The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Dean of the Yale Law School, and Dr. Paul Calabresi, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi.
A scholar of European literature and a native of Ferrara, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini fled fascism in Italy, along with her husband, Dr. Massimo Calabresi, and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. She earned a PhD in French at Yale, with a dissertation on Ernest Renan. She became Professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College, then was for many years Professor and Chair of the Department of Italian at Albertus Magnus College. She died in 1982, at the age of 80.
The lectureship sponsors a distinguished speaker in the field of comparative literature, broadly defined.
