Ferrante is among four Couper Scholars who will visit select colleges and universities during the current academic year. Each visit, lasting two to three days, will include a lecture for undergraduates, informal discussions with students and faculty members, and a meeting with the dean of liberal arts and sciences.
Ferrante is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and past president of the Medieval Academy of America and the Dante Society. She has published many articles and several books, including To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (1997); The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (1984); The Lais of Marie de France, a translation and commentary written with Robert Hanning (1978); Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (1975); Guillaume d’Orange, Four Twelfth Century Epics (1974); and The Conflict of Love and Honor: The Medieval Tristan Legend (1973). She is currently working on a database on medieval women’s letters titled Epistolae.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society established the program through a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. It is named for Richard W. Couper, who was instrumental in helping the Society receive a grant. A longtime champion of the liberal arts and sciences, Couper is a former president of the New York Public Library and the Phi Beta Kappa Fellows.
Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honor society. It has chapters at 270 institutions, and half a million members throughout the country. Its mission is to advocate education in the liberal arts and sciences, to recognize academic excellence, and to foster freedom of thought at expression. Among the Society’s programs are literary and academic awards, lectureships, a fellowship, a professorship, and publication of The American Scholar, an award-winning quarterly journal.
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