We are deeply saddened by the death, on April 20, of Robert Hollander, Emeritus Professor of European Literature in the Department of French and Italian. Hollander was a member of the undergraduate class of 1955, earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University, and joined the Princeton faculty in 1961. He was also a member of the Department of Comparative Literature from 1975 to 1998, including its chair from 1994 to 1998, and Master of Butler College from 1991 to 1995. He retired in 2003. A scholar of medieval Italian literature and related fields, known especially for his voluminous work on Dante and Boccaccio, Hollander was the driving force behind the creation of the Dartmouth Dante Project, a digital archive collecting scores of commentaries on the Commedia, as well as of the Princeton Dante Project, featuring an annotated virtual edition of the poem. From 1979 to 1985 he served as president of the Dante Society of America. His commitment as both a scholar and a teacher of the humanities over more than forty years made him a greatly influential figure in literary studies who will be missed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Princeton University Announcement of Robert Hollander's passing