Research

Professor Corbett has two principal areas of research: theology and the arts (with specialisms in Dante studies, sacred music, and theological aesthetics) and systematic and historical theology (with specialisms in medieval theology, Aquinas’ theology and its influence, and Catholic theology).

Recent Publications:

Monographs

• DANTE’S CHRISTIAN ETHICS: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), ‘Winner, 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title’.

[see here for an academic presentation about the book, and here for a more informal interview with ITIA alumna Joy Clarkson]

• DANTE AND EPICURUS: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (Oxford: Legenda and MHRA, 2013).

Edited Books

• Mandonnet: Dante the Theologian, ed. and trans., with commentary and notes, by George Corbett and Patricia Kelly (Turnhout: Brepols, Studia Traditionis Theologiae, forthcoming)
• Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by George Corbett (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019).
• Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, ed. by George Corbett and Heather Webb, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017).
• Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, ed. by George Corbett and Heather Webb, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016).
• Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, ed. by George Corbett and Heather Webb, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015).

Journal Articles

• ‘The Invention of Ante-Purgatory: Sluggards and Excommunicates in Dante’s “Hopeful Limbo” (Purgatorio i-ix)’, LE TRE CORONE: Revista internazionale di studi su Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio (2023), forthcoming.
• ‘Thomists at War: Pierre Mandonnet, Étienne Gilson, and a Civil War in Aquinas and Dante Studies (1879-2021’, Nova et Vetera 20.4 (Fall 2022), 1053-96.
• ‘Interpreting Dante’s “Commedia”: Competing Perspectives’, Bibliotheca Dantesca, 4 (2021), 1-32.
• ‘Dante, Epicuro, e Firenze: Una rilettura contestuale del dialogo fra Cavalcante e Dante (Inf. X 52-72)’, Studi danteschi 83 (2018), 55-71.
• ‘TheoArtistry, and a Contemporary Perspective on Composing Sacred Choral Music’, Religions 2018, 9 (1), 7 (Special Issue: Music: Its Theologies and Spiritualities – A Global Perspective), doi: 10.3390/rel9010007.
• ‘Parallel Exempla: A Theological Reading of the Terrace of Pride (Purgatorio x-xii)’, LE TRE CORONE: Revista internazionale di studi su Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio (2017), 73-96.
• ‘Peraldus and Aquinas: Two Dominican Approaches to the Seven Capital Vices in the Christian Moral Life’, The Thomist 79 (2015), 383-406.
• ‘MacIntyre, Dante and Modernity’, New Blackfriars, 96 (2015), 345-60.
• ‘The Christian Ethics of Dante’s Purgatory’, Medium Ævum, 83:2 (2014), 266-87
• (and Heather Webb), ‘Three Paths in One Journey: A Vertical Reading of Inf. I, Purg., I, Par. I’, L’Alighieri 41 (2013), 63-81.

Book Chapters

• ‘Dante’s Philosophical and Theological Culture’, in Themes, Traditions, and Cultures in Dante, ed. by Zygmunt G. Baranski et al. (Oxford: Legenda, forthcoming).
• ‘Liturgy: Tradition and Innovation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology, ed. Steve Guthrie and Bennett Zon, 5 volumes, II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
• ‘Creativity’, in T&T Clark Companion to Theology and the Arts, ed. Imogen Adkins and Stephen Garrett (T&T Clark, forthcoming).
• ‘Purgatorio III & IV’, in ‘A piè del monte’: Rivisitando l’antipurgatorio, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey Jr (Rome: Salerno, forthcoming).
• ‘Paradiso XXX’, in Lectura Dantis Andreapolitana, ed. by Claudia Rossignoli and Robert Wilson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
• ‘Mary as a Model for Creative People: Establishing Theologian-Composer Partnerships with James MacMillan’, in Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by George Corbett (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), pp. 31-43.
• ‘Introduction’, in Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by George Corbett (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), pp. 1-6.
• ‘Moral Structure’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Simon Gilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 61-78.
• ‘Dante’s Other-wordly Surprises and This-worldly Polemic’, in Envisioning the Medieval Afterlife, ed. by R.M. Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 286-302.
• ‘Purgatorio XIX’, in Lectura Dantis Andreapolitana, ed. by Claudia Rossignoli and Robert Wilson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
• (and Heather Webb), ‘Introduction’, in George Corbett and Heather Webb (eds), Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), pp. 1-9.
• (and Heather Webb), ‘Introduction’, in George Corbett and Heather Webb (eds), Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016), vol. 2, pp. 1-12.
• ‘Pagan Dawn of a Christian Vision’, in George Corbett and Heather Webb (eds), Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), vol. 1, pp. 13-23.
• (and Heather Webb), ‘Introduction’, in George Corbett and Heather Webb (eds), Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), vol. 1, pp. 1-11.
• (and Robin Kirkpatrick), ‘ “E lascia pur grattar…”: Language, Narrative and Ethics in the Commedia’, in Dante the Lyrical and Ethical Poet. Dante etico e lirico,ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Martin McLaughlin (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp. 56-69.
• ‘Auden’s Imaginary Music’, in New Perspectives in British Cultural History,ed. by Rosalind Crone, David Gange and Katy Jones (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. 232-43.