Professor of Italian Studies CHARLES S. SINGLETON was a world-renowned Dante scholar. His scholarship focused on both Dante and Boccaccio, and his six-volume translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy brought him great acclaim. Dr. Singleton was the recipient of many awards and honors, both in the United States and Italy, including the highest order the Italian government can bestow upon a non-Italian citizen. Dr. Singleton taught at Johns Hopkins from 1939 to his death in 1985. He left Hopkins briefly, from 1948 to 1957, to teach at Harvard, but returned to chair the Department of Romance Languages. He also served as director of the Humanities Center. The Singleton Center for the Study of Pre-Modern Europe at Johns Hopkins is named in honor of Charles S. Singleton.
Charles S. Singleton Chair in Italian Studies
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Foreign Language
Established in 1980 by the Board of Trustees in honor of Charles S. Singleton
Held by Walter Stephens
WALTER STEPHENS joined the Hopkins faculty in 1999 as the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies. Holding doctorates in both comparative literature and philosophy, he studies the intersection of theology, philosophy, and literature in the culture of late medieval and early modern Europe, with particular emphasis on Italy. His books include Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (1989; forthcoming in French translation) and Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. A visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2004-2005, he is at work on books tentatively entitled Pope Noah’s Etruscans: Archeology, Forgery, and Imagination in Renaissance Italy and Antediluvian Books and Lost Encyclopedias: The Lure of the Unreadable from Antiquity to Present. Dr. Stephens is a member of the executive board of the Singleton Center for the Study of Pre-Modern Europe at Johns Hopkins, and a cofounder of Great Books: The Western Tradition, an interdisciplinary team-taught undergraduate course in the Humanities, begun in 2003.