John Kinder

John Kinder is Emeritus Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Western Australia. He retired in 2021 after 33 years at UWA.

His academic career was chiefly in the area of language and in particular the history of Italian language and dialects. However, he read Dante’s Divine Comedy as an undergraduate student and the text stayed with him, professionally and personally. At the end of his teaching career he returned to Dante. He pioneered a new approach to teaching the Comedy, covering the entire work – Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise – in just ten weeks, encouraging students to read the story as a proposal that invited them to dialogue and seek their own answers to the big questions.

To celebrate the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, John organised a number of lectures and events in Perth, many of which were broadcast on national and international media.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of Italy’s Accademia della Crusca, and for services to Italian language and culture abroad was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of Italy.