Professor Robert Harrison holds the Rosina Pierotti Chair and serves as head of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. He received his doctorate in romance studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. His books include
The Body of Beatrice, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988,
Forests: The Shadow of Civilization,
The Dominion of the Dead, and
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. His books have been translated into French, Italian, German, and Japanese. Since 2005 Harrison has had a literary talk show on KZSU radio called Entitled Opinions, featuring hour-long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.
