In 2015 the world celebrated the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth and started preparing the celebrations for the upcoming anniversary of his death. No need to say, these anniversaries concern, more than Dante himself, Dante’s readers. What one should celebrate and discuss are centuries of readings, both silent and aloud; of commentaries and doubts; of creation of ad hoc hermeneutic tools and of import-export of interpretative categories from different disciplinary fields. Indeed, no other author and no other work have offered, from the very beginning, a hermeneutic workshop of equal richness. Not only have new interpretative theories been tested here, but Dante’s work has also become the shared space in which different critical traditions meet and interact with one another. The variety of the tools of interpretation and modes of reading of Dante’s work are also a problematic heritage, transmitted and augmented by each successive generation, sometimes to the point of making Dante criticism a true “dark wood” for those readers who approach it with the goal of simply understanding Dante. Interdisciplinary by nature, ISCAD provides a space of discussion and elaboration among scholars coming from Dante Studies as well as from different traditions of studies, by crossing a variety of methodological approaches: history of key-categories in Dante studies and related fields of study; case-studies to investigate the application of these categories to single episodes of Dante’s work; discussion of the uses and abuses of these categories in Dante Studies and beyond. In 2015-2016, the first edition of ISCAD started exploring this heritage and questioning its future by taking into account two fundamental hermeneutic categories of 20th-century research: “Struttura/Poesia” and “Figura” guided by the two keynote speakers Alberto Asor Rosa (Rome) and Brian Stock (Toronto). In 2016-2017, ISCAD will discuss two key-categories defined and employed by Dante himself: “Contrapasso” and “Allegoria,” guided by Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale) and Justin Steinberg (Chicago). The second edition of ISCAD also obtained the scientific endorsement of the Dante Society of America, as well as the generous support of a Connection Grant awarded by SSRHC.