Junior Will Porter was recently announced the winner of the Dante Society of America's 2010 Dante Prize, a renowned national award.
The prize, awarded annually since 1887, honors an undergraduate at a college in North America who submits the best competitive essay that discusses the life or works of Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
“I’m extremely honored,” Porter said. “I’m incredibly grateful for the support of both professor [Ron] Herzman – for whose class I wrote the original paper – and the English department faculty.”
Porter originally wrote his essay for Herzman’s Dante class during the spring semester of his sophomore year. In order to submit his essay to the Dante Society, he had to replace his quotations from the English-translation text with quotations in the original language of Italian.
“I don’t actually speak Italian, so that was difficult,” Porter said, adding that he “spent a good portion of the summer” revising and adding to the original paper before submitting it to the contest.
Porter said that his winning essay - titled “'L'arco de lo essilio': The Nexus of History, Pilgrimage and Prophecy in the Heaven of Mars” – is about “the nature and significance of exile in Paradiso,” the third book of Divine Comedy.
“As soon as I got to the second paragraph, I knew he would have to submit it,” Herzman said. “I knew that there are no sure things in this world, but I thought if he didn’t win I would sure want to see the essay that was better than his.”
Herzman said that Porter’s receipt of the award is a tremendous achievement and a testament to his incredible skill in literary criticism, which he said “comes much closer to that of published scholars than it does to undergraduate students.”
“The people that have received the award have gone on to have distinguished careers as scholars and particularly as Dante scholars,” Herzman said. “If Will wants to go in that direction, he’ll have a stunning career.”
Porter is the second Geneseo student in five years to win the Dante Prize. In 2006, former-Geneseo student Lisa Caruana shared the prize with a student from Harvard University.
Paul Schacht, chair of the English department, said that the award is a testament both to Will’s outstanding talent and to the high quality of Geneseo English majors. “The fact that two Geneseo students in five years have received the award says that the English majors in Geneseo are on par with the best undergraduate English majors in the country,” he said.