DAY ONE - THURSDAY, JUNE 6

Co-sponsored by the American Boccaccio Association

Description:

Percezioni e rappresentazioni legate al Mediterraneo, il ruolo del mercante in testi di differente natura. Riflessioni e argomenti di varia natura quali, per esempio il commercio di idee, le ipotesi intorno al viaggio, gli itinerari, le rotte marittime o specifiche destinazioni, la Terrasanta, l’Oriente, l’Occidente.  Avventure, i resoconti, i diari, le lettere, i viaggi; rappresentazioni e percezioni dello spazio marino e delle isole entro le differenti sponde del Mediterraneo.

Chairs: David P. Bénéteau (Seton Hall University) & Angela Fabris (University of Klagenfurt)

Simona Esposito (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Napoli)
L’isola come cronotopo elegiaco nel Decameron. Dal pianto d’amore al 'diurno lamento' di Beritola Caracciolo (II 6)

Angela Fabris (University of Klagenfurt)
Itinerari, rappresentazioni e percezioni marine: scambi di idee e merci nelle novelle mediterranee del Decameron

David P. Bénéteau (Seton Hall University)
Codici posseduti dai mercanti dalla Terrasanta a Genova

Description:

This panel explores how Italian women, specifically writers, performers, and screenwriters who engaged with positivist anthropology, visual arts, and silent cinema, participated in social and cultural modernization during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Italian women were the subject of significant discussions about their identities and roles in the fast-changing socio-economic structure. Still, they were also receptive to the cultural and technological changes in literature, art, and silent cinema and made crucial contributions through their writing and professional ties. The participants will approach the topic from different angles and show the complexity of women’s role in Liberal Italy.

Chair: Michela Bertossa (Ohio State University)

Cristina Gragnani (Temple University)
Pseudoscienza e giurisprudenza della prostituzione in due romanzi sociali postunitari

Ombretta Frau (Mount Holyoke University)
New men and somber scenery in Deledda’s Chiaroscuro

Katharine Mitchell (University of Strathclyde)
Italian female screenwriters as a collective force in the late silent film industry

Michela Bertossa (The Ohio State University)
Scandalous mothers and eugenic fantasies in Negroni’s L’avvoltoio (1912) 

Description:

Il panel, sviluppato in seno al progetto "Cinephemera. Materiali effimeri per lo studio del cinema italiano", propone una riflessione circa il ruolo dei materiali effimeri (oggetti, carte, manufatti) quali potenziali fonti storiografiche innovative per lo studio della storia culturale del cinema in Italia. La ricerca fa riferimento agli studi sulla cultura materiale e alla microstoria, per inquadrare gli "ephemera" come oggetti della socialità quotidiana; e ai Fandom e Gender Studies per ricostruire le dinamiche di consumo partecipativo e il modo in cui collaborano alla costruzione di una soggettività di genere.

Chair: Federico Vitella (Universitá degli Studi di Messina)

Federico Vitella (Università di Messina)
Auguri Gina! La maternità di Gina Lollobrigida nelle lettere degli ammiratori

Laura Busetta (Università di Messina)
Il cinema fra le pagine. Scrittura soggettiva e modelli di genere nel diario intimo

Stella Scabelli (Università di Firenze)
La corrispondenza come fonte per la storia (di genere) della critica. La rete di collaboratrici della rivista (Film)

Description:

This panel will focus on queer transnationalism in cinema and literature, emphasizing the role that travel plays in relation to family dynamics and social relationships. It explores travel through multiple lenses: as a transformational experience through the discovery of new concepts of enjoyment while maintaining openness and a sense of marvel as well as a painful journey into fragmented identities and the desire to belong somewhere. This panel will also explore how traveling affects mental and physical health.

Organizer: Alessio Ponzio (University of Saskatchewan)

Chair: Matthew Zundel (Miami University)

Claudia Romanelli  (The University of Alabama)
From Portland to Rome in imago Dei: Christian symbolism and iconography in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho

Luca Lanzilotta (Dickinson College)
Inverting the family trend: Robert Ferro and his love affair with Italy

Eilis Kierans (The State University of Pennyslvania)
Masculinities and mental health in Matteo Bianchi's 'La vita di chi resta'

Soraya Cipolla (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaigne)
Transnational Black Queerness and monsters in Igiaba Scego’s work

Description:

This roundtable discusses a variety of pedagogical frameworks to promote DEIB in the Italian language classroom. Presenters will share their experiences in applying strategies to create content and foster safe environments, while demonstrating how inclusive instruction can accommodate different learning styles.

Chair: Samantha Gillen (University of Georgia)

Samantha Gillen (University of Georgia); Lourdes Contreras (University of Pennsylvania); Rossella Di Rosa (University of Pennsylvania)

Description:

The forming of imperial boundary is an ongoing process, often facilitated by those who purport to mediate. This panel investigates the roles of four Italian interlocutors in medieval and early modern trans-imperial relations. From Sicily to Southern China, these Italian interlocutors found their subjecthood—aligned to specific religious and political bonds at home—at odds with the imperative of cultural mediation in foreign lands. A scribe, a monk, a historian, and a priest, all four undertook the translation of culture. How did they make the culture they represented believable, thus imperial authority perceivable, to their audience?

Chair: Yixin Alfred Wang (University of Toronto)

Yixin Alfred Wang (University of Toronto)
The Chinese Mirror: Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, and Sino-Jesuit Ethnography, 1580-1610

Anna D'Ambrosio (Università di Salerno)
Alla conquista della realtà: il dialogo tra l’Europa e il Giappone nella produzione a stampa dal XVI al XVIII secolo

John Schechtman-Marko (University of Toronto)
All the world's a page: Cultural hybridization in the documentary scripts of Norman Sicily 1130-1212

Jamie Collings (University of Toronto)
Durable spirituality and worldly involvement: Insular Greek and Benedictine Monastic Syncretism in the development of 12th-century Southern Italian Monasticism

Description:

This roundtable explores interventions onto cultural landscapes and built environments that project the idea of Italianess (Italianità) onto physical spaces. The roundtable aims to rethink the contribution of Italian material culture in the construction of Italian transnational identities by focusing on landscapes and the various ways in which humans and more-than-human beings continue to shape them.

Chair: Derek Duncan (University of St. Andrews)

Stephanie Malia Hom (University of California, Santa Barbara); Derek Duncan (University of St Andrews); Lina Insana (University of Pittsburgh); Michele Monserrati (Smith College); Veronica Pecile (University of Lucerne); Marialuisa Stazio (Università di Napoli Federico II)

Co-sponsored by the Women's Studies Caucus and the Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migrations Caucus.

Description:

Cultural creators in Italy have responded in various ways to the contexts of neo/fascist, neo/colonial, and neo/liberal politics and economies across the 20th and 21st centuries. They have subscribed to and promoted hegemonic structures of oppression, marginalization, and discrimination, or have been silent about prevailing conditions, or have tackled these structures and conditions implicitly or explicitly.  This panel presents analyses of creators who offer critiques of dominant deployments of gender, sexuality, and culture, while existing within hegemonic systems.

Organizer: Sonita Sarker (Macalester College)

Chair: Alessio Ponzio (University of Saskatchewan)

Marta Cerreti (Johns Hopkins University)
Disobedient women against hegemonic courtrooms: Maria Edgarda Marcucci’s Rabbia proteggimi

Alessio Ponzio (University of Saskatchewan)
Failed projects and lonely hearts: Der Kreis and the Italian homophiles in the 1950s

Eleonora Bonazzi (Leopold-Franzens Universität at Innsbruck)
Reading religious change attempts in Malombra’s media legacy 

Description:

This is the first of three sessions organized under the aegis of Annali d’italianistica and dealing with the metaphor of the world upside down: the condition of an individual, a society, or the world at large, in which such fundamental concepts as goodness, beauty, truth, unity, order, as well as other related notions, are upended, turned around, reversed. Throughout the centuries, the metaphor under scrutiny has taken on countless literary forms, from farce to parody and satire; from the realistic to the fictional; from the grotesque to the burlesque and the carnivalesque. 

Organizers: Stefania Porcelli (Hunter College) & Dino S. Cervigni, Emeritus (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Chair: Stefania Porcelli (Hunter College)

Dino S. Cervigni, Emeritus (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
The world upside down: Theory and practice

Filippo Fabbricatore (The Graduate Center CUNY)
The unfigurable Comedy: Overturnings of the human form in Dante’s Inferno

Annalisa Guzzardi (The Graduate Center CUNY)
The exile inverting the world: Dante interlocutor of Ovidio

Giulia M. Cipriani (Johns Hopkins University)
La resistenza del Diavolo tra corpo inverso e linguaggio: gli esempi di Dante, Tasso e Marino

Description:

This panel will share highlights from a new interdisciplinary research initiative at Johns Hopkins University between Italian Studies and the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. These projects examine the cultural, spiritual, and medical history of humanity’s engagement with psychedelics, as well as the meaning ascribed to experiences of altered states of consciousness in the history of Italian literature.

Organizer: Catherine Freddo (Johns Hopkins University)

Chair: Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University) 

Cla Calabresi (Johns Hopkins University)
Psychedelic Feminism: Body, Gender and Jesus in the mysticism of Angela of Foligno  

Catherine Freddo (Johns Hopkins University)
For those who are troubled and ill: Psychedelic medicine in Early Modern Italy

Gianluca Giuseffi (Johns Hopkins University)
Underground highs: Psychedelics in Italian counterculture

Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University)
A psychedelic Renaissance

Description:

From Dante’s selva oscura to Calvino’s Il barone rampante, Italian literature has offered powerful examples of trees in narrative. Given the turn in scholarship towards Environmental Studies, these texts are being interpreted from new perspectives. What are these authors’ attitudes toward the nature described in their works? Is there a new ecological consciousness that we can acquire from the presence of trees in these works? This first panel will focus on trees in medieval Italian literature.

Organizer: Martina Franzini (Johns Hopkins University)

Chair: Giulia Andreoni (College of the Holy Cross)

Martina Franzini (Johns Hopkins University)
Arboreal symbolism in Dante’s Purgatory

Simona Biancalana (Accademia della Crusca)
Alberi e piante nella Commedia. Casi di studio dal “Vocabolario Dantesco”  

James F. McMenamin (Dickinson College)
Petrarch’s trees beyond the laurel

Description:

This panel explores the variegated aspects of "teaching women" in Italian Studies today. How do we include Italian women authors and artists in our courses? What mentorship practices have we found particularly helpful for female students? What ideas and suggestions do we have for including more women in our Italian courses and syllabi? Interventions may include showcasing a certain teaching activity or unit centered on Italian women authors and artists. This may include strategies we have used in the past as well as ideas we have for new activities and units we’d like to teach in the future.

Chair: Cristin Scalzo Jones (University of California, Merced)

Kristen Keach Muyo (James Madison University)
Hidden faces in open spaces: the role of women in the arts

Brenda Rosado (University of California, Berkeley)
Do premodern women writers have authorships?

Mariagrazia De Luca (University of California, Berkeley)
Translingual female novelists: Reimagining and teaching a new Italianness

Bristin Scalzo Jones (University of California, Merced)
A group of one's own: Creating spaces for women in academia

Description:

How does an author form their own rhetoric, style, and voice? How is authority generated within a tradition? To what extent are adaptations and adoptions intentional choices? This panel deals with various aspects of the Italian canon, alternative canons, the role of gender and queer interpretations in the construction of a canon, and the impact of 'minor' authors within the literary horizon. Specifically, it explores adaptations and adoptions of literary models, genres, and forms to craft distinctive and original voices.

Organizers: Giulia Cardillo (James Madison University) & Eleonora Buonocore (University of Calgary)

Chair: Pina Palma (Southern Connecticut State University)

Eleonora Buonocore (University of Calgary)
’Il Santo Inganno:’ Caterina da Siena’s use of dantean images and rhetoric in her epistolary

Samantha Civitarese (University of Notre Dame)
Fashioning her widowhood: Vittoria Colonna’s original adaptation of Petrarch’s lyrical experience

Giulia Cardillo (James Madison University)
Chiseling verses: Stampa and Michelangelo on love and sculpture

Organized by the Women’s Studies Caucus

Description:

This panel discusses female activism in Italy throughout the centuries. What practices do we consider activist? What goals did women articulate and which ones did they meet? Contributions explore Italian women’s activism in diverse areas, including labor struggles, environmental issues, reproductive rights, and racial justice, among others, and from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Organizers: Juliet Guzzetta (Michigan State University), Claudia Karagoz (Saint Louis University), & Anna Marra (Vanderbilt University)

Chair: Anna Marra (Vanderbilt University)

Carmen Guarino (Palermo University and University of Oxford)
Artivist feminisms. Echoes from Le Nemesiache

Valeria Federici (University of Maryland)
Agnese Trocchi: Activist, artist, and digital manipulator

Description:

This multi-session “Performance and the Political” panel considers how, as acts of collective creation and rhetorical enterprise, performance can exert power, challenge dominant discourses, and construct a sense of community and belonging. This session focuses on queer and feminist performance as a site for reimagining the intersections between gender and political engagement, and it foregrounds the 1970s as a key moment of creative exploration. Placed in conversation, these papers ask how bodies, voices, and historical perspectives can speak to each other and respond to the needs for expression and transformation of communities.

Chair: Emily Antenucci (Vassar College)

Emily Antenucci (Vassar College)
'Amare da Comunista’: Love and revolution in Teatro La Maddalena’s Nonostante Gramsci

Roberta Minnucci (Bibliotheca Hertziana- Max Planck Institute for Art History)
Performing myth in the outskirts of Naples: A feminist rewriting of Pandora’s Box  

Alessandro Ludovico Minucci (University of Chicago)
Feminist voices in contemporary Italian spoken word

Alessandra Mulè (New York University)
Lotta Culana. Camping the left in Kollettivo Teatrale Trousses Merletti Cappuccini e Cappelliere’s performance practice

Description:

This is the second of three sessions organized under the aegis of Annali d’italianistica and dealing with the metaphor of the world upside down: the condition of an individual, a society, or the world at large, in which such fundamental concepts as goodness, beauty, truth, unity, order, as well as other related notions, are upended, turned around, reversed. Throughout the centuries, the metaphor under scrutiny has taken on countless literary forms, from farce to parody and satire; from the realistic to the fictional; from the grotesque to the burlesque and the carnivalesque. 

Organizers: Stefania Porcelli (Hunter College) & Dino S. Cervigni, Emeritus (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Chair: Valerio Cappozzo (University of Mississippi)

Darren Kusar (The University of Chicago)
Tasso’s Diabolical Amphitheater: Demonic voice and psychological Ssubversion in the Forest of Saron

Laura Mattioli (Durham University)
Utopian discourse and the construction of the world upside down in Anton Francesco Doni’s Gli spiriti folletti and ‘Mondo Savio’

Cosetta Gaudenzi (The University of Memphis)  
Turning Eighteenth-century British literature and culture upside down through Dante’s Inferno

Andrea Capra (Princeton University)
Giacomo Leopardi’s Garden of Suffering; Or, turning the sublime upside down

Chair: Robert A. Rushing (University of California, Los Angeles)

Luca Naponiello (University of Massachusetts, Lowell)
The roots of an Italian 'Grimm': Italo Calvino between ecology and folklore

Robert A. Rushing (University of California, Los Angeles)
Calvino's voice: Falsetto, stuttering, laughter

Vincenzo Selleri (Farmingdale State College)
The world of Italian horror

Emily Meneghin (Penn State University)
l'italiano vero non si trova a Treccani, nun aje capit, حبيبتي

Description:

From Dante’s selva oscura to Calvino’s Il barone rampante, Italian literature has offered powerful examples of trees in narrative. Given the turn in scholarship towards Environmental Studies, these texts are being interpreted from new perspectives. What are these authors’ attitudes toward the nature described in their works? Is there a new ecological consciousness that we can acquire from the presence of trees in these works?

Organizer: Martina Franzini (Johns Hopkins University)

Chair: Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University)

Lourdes Contreras (University of Pennsylvania)
Ciascuno si orizzontava: Uprooted arboreal landscapes in Fausta Cialente’s novels and short stories

Maria Luisa Mura (Aix-Marseille Université)  
I paesaggi arborei di Giuseppe Dessì: memoria storica e ambientale di uno (s)radicamento

Rossella Di Rosa (University of Pennsylvania)
What reeds can teach us: Vegetative imaginaries in Fabrizia Ramondino’s writings

Description:

This panel explores the uncovering and recovering of Italian diasporic connections and conflicts with First Nations and the Peoples of the Horn of Africa; and the remembering of, and the reckoning with, our Italian colonizer/colonized ancestors and heritages. What role did Italian migrants and their descendants play in influencing and condoning, as well as questioning and confronting, racist and colonialist ideologies on national, community, familial and interpersonal levels?
Did Italian migrants ‘import’ colonial and racial attitudes and convictions that they had acquired in their homelands and colonies, such as Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa, or did they learn these from host society employers, neighbours, churches, schools and media? How can we draw from our heritages and histories, our contemporary individual projects and our decolonising collaborations as scholars and activists, allies and advocates, to do truth-telling and truth-listening, offer strengths-based directions in healing ongoing tensions, including a re-visioning of migrant historiography, and celebrate the connections between First Nations, Peoples of the Horn of Africa and the Italian diaspora.

Chair: Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli (Deakin University)

Michele Baldaro (University of Venice)
Colonial intersections and the myth of «Italiani brava gente» in the setting of Mario Tobino’s Libya

Carla Panico (University of Coimbra) 
Italian colonialism and the Southern Diaspora: Amnesias, competitive memories, Iintersectional alliances and the deconstruction of a white imagined community

Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli (Deakin University)
'Backyard reckonings': Colonizer/Colonized crossings and reckonings in an Italian-Australian backyard

Description:

How does an author form their own rhetoric, style, and voice? How is authority generated within a tradition? To what extent are adaptations and adoptions intentional choices? This panel deals with various aspects of the Italian canon, alternative canons, the role of gender and queer interpretations in the construction of a canon, and the impact of 'minor' authors within the literary horizon. Specifically, it explores adaptations and adoptions of literary models, genres, and forms to craft distinctive and original voices.

Organizers: Giulia Cardillo (James Madison University) & Eleonora Buonocore (University of Calgary)

Chair: Eleonora Buonocore (University of Calgary)

Kristen Keach Muyo (James Madison University)
Mediations on her afterlife: Rachel Owen’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno

Alessandro Giammei (Yale University)
Adopting the Rinascimento: The Black American myth of Alessandro de’Medici

Alessia Dalsant (Bentley University)
The heritage of Commedia dell’Arte in the US  

Organized by the Women’s Studies Caucus

Description:

Pathbreakers push the boundaries of what is known or accepted, leaving a lasting impact on their respective fields and inspiring future generations. This panel aims to shine a spotlight on the remarkable contributions of Italian women in any time period to the fields of medicine, science, politics, education, arts, and literature. It will emphasize their extraordinary journeys, exploring the challenges they faced, the barriers they shattered, and the enduring impact they left on Italian society and beyond.

Organizers: Juliet Guzzetta (Michigan State University), Claudia Karagoz (Saint Louis University), & Anna Marra (Vanderbilt University)

Chair: Claudia Karagoz (St. Louis University)

Anna Marra (Vanderbilt University)
Redefining Renaissance romance: Exploring queer love through Emilia's eyes

Patrizia Bettella (University of Alberta)
A Venetian woman amazes the world by getting a University degree

Jenniffer S. Griffiths (The Umbra Institute)
Benedetta Futurista in transhistorical feminist contexts

Francesca Parmeggiani (Fordham University)
La teologia del quotidiano di Adriana Zarri

Description:

This multi-session “Performance and the Political” panel considers how, as acts of collective creation and rhetorical enterprise, performance can exert power, challenge dominant discourses, and construct a sense of community. The papers in this session cover performance within a range of Italian media and across time periods, including the hybridities of contemporary rap, scandalous militant cinema, staged civil disobedience, and early modern translations. The panel also offers opportunities to consider the afterlives of a performance once it is filmed, recorded, or written down. 

Organizers: Emily Antenucci (Vassar College) & Rachel E. Love (University of Pittsburgh)

Chair: Rachel E. Love (University of Pittsburgh)

Rachel Grasso (University of Toronto)
Rapping back: Challenging Italianità in the rap and trap music of second-generation Italian artists

Selby Schwartz (Independent Scholar)
Performing the white bride: Drag politics in Io sto con la sposa

Paola De Santo (University of Georgia)
Editing out isabella: The politics of translation in the case of Isabella Andreini’s Lettere (1607)

Massimiliano L. Delfino (Northwestern University)
Elio Petri and performance as political satire: The case of Todo Modo and the Cold War

Description:

This is the third of three sessions organized under the aegis of Annali d’italianistica and dealing with the metaphor of the world upside down: the condition of an individual, a society, or the world at large, in which such fundamental concepts as goodness, beauty, truth, unity, order, as well as other related notions, are upended, turned around, reversed. Throughout the centuries, the metaphor under scrutiny has taken on countless literary forms, from farce to parody and satire; from the realistic to the fictional; from the grotesque to the burlesque and the carnivalesque. 

Organizers: Stefania Porcelli (Hunter College) & Dino S. Cervigni, Emeritus (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Chair: Cosetta Gaudenzi (The University of Memphis)

Sara Boezio (University of Notre Dame)
Fin-de-siècle apocalyptic fears and regenerative dreams: Upside-down world at the end of the century

Giancarlo Tursi (University of California Santa Barbara)
"Lu mundu capisutta”: Giuseppe De Dominicis’ Canti de l’autra vita (1900) as Menippean satire

Roberto Risso (Clemson University)
Dissipatio H. G. di Guido Morselli e la terra senza esseri umani: un mondo alla rovescia per l’involontario superstite

Maria Laura Spanedda (Rutgers University)
A journey through hell. From the famous Caronte and Flegiàs to the anonymous ‘Scafisti’

Chair: Laura Lori (University of Melbourne)

Elena Schmitt (Southern Connecticut State University) and Anastasia Sorokina (Southern Connecticut State University)
The Eastern thread in Italian Diaspora: Tapestry of Italian immigration to Russia and Ukraine

Aleksandra Pogonska-Baranowska (University of Warsaw)
The uninhabitable Earth: the visions of the future in contemporary post-apocalyptic dystopian novels

Concetta Maria Sigona (University of Burgos)
The literary representation of the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus in Italian Canadian writers

Laura Lori (University of Melbourne)
Transcultural and diasporic bonds in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s Le stazioni della luna

Description:

From Dante’s selva oscura to Calvino’s Il barone rampante, Italian literature has offered powerful examples of trees in narrative. Given the turn in scholarship towards Environmental Studies, these texts are being interpreted from new perspectives. What are these authors’ attitudes toward the nature described in their works? Is there a new ecological consciousness that we can acquire from the presence of trees in these works?

Organizer: Martina Franzini (Johns Hopkins University)

Chair: Laura Di Bianco (Johns Hopkins University)

Anna Gorini (Università di Siena)
Oriana Fallaci's trees as a symbol of courage, freedom and regeneration of life

Paolo Chirumbolo (Louisiana State University)
Gli alberi e la Calabria, tra inferno e paradiso. Note sulla narrativa calabrese contemporanea

Eilis Kierans (Penn State University)
Returning to our roots: Trees in the work of Erri de Luca

Description:

AI-powered tools can enhance language learning, literary analysis, and cross-cultural exploration both inside and outside of the classroom. Yet the ubiquity of AI presents profound challenges in higher education today, from ensuring the authenticity of student work to keeping student learning firmly rooted in human interaction. This roundtable highlights successful applications of AI in teaching Italian language and culture, with a focus on showcasing specific examples of AI-integrated activities and assessments that enhance student learning.

Chair: Erin Larkin (Southern Connecticut State University)

Sienna Hopkins (California State University); Erin Larkin (Southern Connecticut State University); Ryan Padden (Northeastern University London)