DAY FOUR - SUNDAY, JUNE 9
8:15 am - 8:45 am | Breakfast
8:45 am - 10:15 am | Morning Session - Part I
Description: As analysed by various scholars (Dickie 1999; Moe 2006; Schneider 1998), the Italian Unification in the nineteenth century heightened a process of othering regarding the Mezzogiorno, relegating it to a role of subalternity compared to the more ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’ North. Following the footsteps of Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought (2012), today there is an epistemological change regarding the South and its representations (Ferrante 2019; Polizzi 2022), one that in particular involves forms of non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations across different cultural forms. The sessions explore a variety of perspectives, exploring the intersection between queerness, Southern Italy, and other elements. |
Organizers: Alice Parrinello (University of Oxford) & Valentina Amenta (Università La Sapienza, Roma) Chair: Alice Parrinello (University of Oxford) Michael Tortorella (Independent Scholar) Francesca Romana Ammaturo (London Metropolitan) |
Description: «Bisogna riconoscere - scriveva Montale in un saggio del 1961 - che oggi il viaggio inteso come esperienza di vita non esiste più». Apparentemente muovendosi sulla falsariga del Levi-Strauss di Tristi tropici (la prima edizione italiana è dell'anno precedente), Montale riflette sulla «fine dei viaggi» e, con passaggio immediato, sul destino stesso dell'arte: quella pittorica, nella quale il paesaggio ha perso ormai la sua unità per esplodere, con Kokoshka e Morandi, in una rappresentazione di frammenti. L'evoluzione - o meglio degenerazione - tocca però soprattutto la forma romanzo e, commenta Montale, oggi il viaggio di formazione di Wilhelm Meister sarebbe inconcepibile. E tuttavia, a sei decenni di distanza, le analisi di Levi-Strauss e Montale (tra i molti) sembrano da rivedere, correggere e arricchire: il legame tra viaggio, rappresentazione del paesaggio e romanzo, soprattutto nelle sue forme ibride, sembra infatti oggi saldissimo, tanto da poter pensare al racconto di viaggio come epitome del genere. Basti pensare ad autori quali Bruce Chatwin, Geoff Dyer in area anglosassone, a Giorgio Vasta, Tommaso Pincio, Antonio Franchini in Italia, e molti altri. |
Organizers: Dalila Colucci (Università di Siviglia) & Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (Università di Torino) Chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (Università di Torino) Dalila Colucci (Università di Siviglia) Lorenzo Marchese (Università di Palermo) Elena Grazioli (Università Statale di Milano) |
Description: Elements like water and air are so all-encompassing as to elude territorial boundaries, extending well beyond the borders of any one nation-state. And yet, water and air, sky and sea, are integral to political and poetic imaginations. How do we attend to the material and symbolic aspects of these elements, beyond colonial fictions and fantasies of mastery? What are the effects of such fictions and fantasies on these elemental bodies, and how might water and air elude or resist capture by them? How does an elemental politics emerge from within Italian national culture and undermine its many violent enclosures and transgressions? |
Chair: Rebecca Falkoff (Univeristy of Texas, Austin) Akash Kumar (University of California, Berkeley) Roberto Ferrini (Yale University) Federica Soddu (Rutgers University) Daria Kozhanova (Duke University) |
Chair: Eve Darian-Smith (University of California Irvine) Eve Darian-Smith and Philip C. McCarty (University of California Irvine); Colleen C. Myles (Texas State University); Chiara Feliciani and Sandra Cavaliere (Graduate Institute of Geneva); Costanza Paolillo (New York University) |
Chair: Julie Robarts (University of Melbourne and European University Institute) Marilyn Migiel (Cornell University) Julie Robarts (University of Melbourne and European University Institute) Cristina Perissinotto (University of Ottawa) |
Description: Following the recent publication of the co-edited issue of Rivista di studi italiani entirely devoted to poetry and the environment, this panel aims to extend the conversation to the luoghi della poesia, namely the spaces, places, territories, habitats, and landscapes of poetry–geographical, typographical, imaginary, and virtual. Poetry’s visceral rootedness in the world–or, equally significant, its stubborn vagrancy and its being out of joint with time and place–is too often overlooked. This panel features contributions about poetry and its intersections with or across the following areas: Environment, geography, academia, education, the publishing world, translation, the typed or handwritten page, digital platforms and experimentation, technology, film, photography, theater, music, sound, noise, reproduction, place, space, wilderness, and imaginary landscapes. |
Organizer: Serena Ferrando (Arizona State University) Chair: Alessio Giovene (Florida Atlantic University) Mariagiorgia Ulbar (University of Malaga) Serena Ferrando (Arizona State University) Alessio Giovene (Florida Atlantic University) Sophia Cartwright (Arizona State University) |
Sponsored by the Italian Art Society Description: Recent scholarship has turned to examinations of the role of the body and its senses in the reception and use of art. In this panel, three papers examine ways that body-mind practices shaped and were shaped by the devotional art of early Renaissance Italy. All three papers concern art made for religious orders, where traditional monastic ideals tended toward a distrust of the body as a site of sin. With the rise of the mendicant orders and within a late medieval culture of religious reforms, the body instead became viewed as an appropriate site where the physical allowed for connection to the spiritual. These three studies examine various facets of this turn, from the way art and the body were used in tandem, to the idea of poverty and its physical effects, to iconographic innovations intended to encourage new ways of seeing God. |
Chair: Holly Flora (Tulane University) Rebekah Compton (College of Charleston) Holly Flora (Tulane University) Allie Terry-Fritsch (Bowling Green State University) |
Description: The panel addresses the resurgence of baroque tropes in Italian art, music, and literature, with a special emphasis on spectral manifestation and a rhetoric of the trace. By drawing on Derrida's definition of hauntology, the panel will illustrate how ghosts can take the form of apparitions, auditory echoes, or literary perceptions. |
Chair: Alessandro Giardino (St. Lawrence University) Itay Sapir (Université du Quebec à Montréal) Eugenio Refini (New York University) Marcella Salvi (St. Lawrence University) |
Chair: Claudio Fogu (University of California, Santa Barbara) Claudio Fogu (University of California, Santa Barbara); Benedetta Cutolo (The Graduate Center - CUNY); Lorenzo Rinelli (Temple University Rome) |
10:20 am - 11:50 am | Morning Session - Part II
Description: As analysed by various scholars (Dickie 1999; Moe 2006; Schneider 1998), the Italian Unification in the nineteenth century heightened a process of othering regarding the Mezzogiorno, relegating it to a role of subalternity compared to the more ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’ North. Following the footsteps of Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought (2012), today there is an epistemological change regarding the South and its representations (Ferrante 2019; Polizzi 2022), one that in particular involves forms of non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations across different cultural forms. The sessions explore a variety of perspectives, exploring the intersection between queerness, Southern Italy, and other elements. |
Organizers: Alice Parrinello (University of Oxford) & Valentina Amenta (Università La Sapienza, Roma) Chair: Francesca Romana Ammaturo (London Metropolitan University) Giusi Russo (Montgomery County Community College) Claudia Karagoz (Saint Louis University) Valentina Amenta (Università La Sapienza, Roma) Alice Parrinello (University of Oxford) |
Description: «Bisogna riconoscere - scriveva Montale in un saggio del 1961 - che oggi il viaggio inteso come esperienza di vita non esiste più». Apparentemente muovendosi sulla falsariga del Levi-Strauss di Tristi tropici (la prima edizione italiana è dell'anno precedente), Montale riflette sulla «fine dei viaggi» e, con passaggio immediato, sul destino stesso dell'arte: quella pittorica, nella quale il paesaggio ha perso ormai la sua unità per esplodere, con Kokoshka e Morandi, in una rappresentazione di frammenti. L'evoluzione - o meglio degenerazione - tocca però soprattutto la forma romanzo e, commenta Montale, oggi il viaggio di formazione di Wilhelm Meister sarebbe inconcepibile. E tuttavia, a sei decenni di distanza, le analisi di Levi-Strauss e Montale (tra i molti) sembrano da rivedere, correggere e arricchire: il legame tra viaggio, rappresentazione del paesaggio e romanzo, soprattutto nelle sue forme ibride, sembra infatti oggi saldissimo, tanto da poter pensare al racconto di viaggio come epitome del genere. Basti pensare ad autori quali Bruce Chatwin, Geoff Dyer in area anglosassone, a Giorgio Vasta, Tommaso Pincio, Antonio Franchini in Italia, e molti altri. |
Organizers: Dalila Colucci (Università di Siviglia) & Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (Università di Torino) Chair: Dalila Colucci (Università di Siviglia) Leonarda Trapassi (Università di Siviglia) Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (Università di Torino) Emanuele Broccio (Università di Siviglia) |
Description: Elements like water and air are so all-encompassing as to elude territorial boundaries, extending well beyond the borders of any one nation-state. And yet, water and air, sky and sea, are integral to political and poetic imaginations. How do we attend to the material and symbolic aspects of these elements, beyond colonial fictions and fantasies of mastery? What are the effects of such fictions and fantasies on these elemental bodies, and how might water and air elude or resist capture by them? How does an elemental politics emerge from within Italian national culture and undermine its many violent enclosures and transgressions? |
Chair: Rhiannon Welch (University of California, Berkeley) Claudia Lombardo (University of North Carolina) Nicole Trigg (University of California, Berkeley) Lydia Tuan (Yale University) Claudio Fogu (University of California, Santa Barbara) |
Co-chairs: Stiliana Milkova Rousseva (Oberlin College and Conservatory) and Saskia Ziolkowski (Duke University) Silvia Caserta (Liceo Scientifico Statale Niccolò Copernico, Prato); Teresa Franco (Università di Milano); Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Franklin and Marshall College); Enrica Ferrara (Trinity College Dublin); Barbara Halla (Duke University) |
Description: This panel discusses the many entanglements between theatre and rhetoric in early modern Italy. It tackles the subject from three innovative and complementary perspectives: the first paper reconstructs how the use of theatrical metaphors shaped Tesauro’s revolutionary theory of rhetoric in Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico. The second paper moves from theory to practice. It examines the oratory skills of professional actresses in early modern Italy and shows how they were successfully deployed in non-dramatic contexts. Finally, the last paper focuses on actresses’ silent eloquence and advances the hypothesis that their mastery of rhetoric occasionally achieved a mockery of rhetoric itself. |
Organizer: Serena Laiena (University College Dublin) Chair: TBD Teodoro Katinis (Ghent University) Serena Laiena (University College Dublin) Eric Nicholson (New York University Florence) |
Sponsored by the Women's Studies Caucus as well as the Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migrations Caucus Description: This panel presents a range of responses to dominant structures and conditions of violence and/or erasure against the impoverished, im/migrant, as well as against internally displaced or culturally minoritized peoples, based on race, class, gender, and sexuality. A question that relate to the analyses of creators’ identities and works is as follows: How and why is the political and cultural essence of Italy as a nation-state (Italianità) implicitly or explicitly gendered, classed, and racialized? |
Chair: Sonita Sarker (Macalester College) Erica Moretti (Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY) Loredana Di Martino (University of San Diego) |
Description: This panel addresses any form of literature and cinema by authors and directors with either a postmodern or posthuman point of view which explore the intersection between body and vision. |
Orgnizers: Ioana Larco (University of Kentucky) & Matteo Benassi (University of Kentucky) Chair: Matteo Benassi (University of Kentucky) Valentina Graziuso (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Deion Dresser (University of Pennsylvania) Matteo Benassi (University of Kentucky) Ioana Larco (University of Kentucky) |