COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Department of Italian

GRADUATE CONFERENCE

CALL FOR PAPERS

Great Incompletes: Italy’s Unfinished Endeavors

3-4 FEBRUARY 2017

Keynote speaker: Professor Thomas Harrison (UCLA)

This conference will investigate the question of incompleteness in Italian cultural and social history through an array of theoretical perspectives and case studies. From the unfinished works of Dante to Puccini’s Turandot, from Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere to the grandi opere of the Salerno-Reggio Calabria, the list of “great incompletes” is as long as it is diverse. What do incomplete projects have in common? How does an unfinished film differ from an unfinished bridge or novel? How can a text be deemed complete? Are our expectations as readers, viewers and witnesses influenced because of this purported unfinished-ness?

The history of Italian art, philosophy and politics is also brimming with works that deploy incompleteness as a deliberate narrative device. Michelangelo’s poetics of non-finito and the aesthetic debate on the possibility/impossibility of reaching perfection in art, reappears in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. The openness of Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana challenges the limits of a literary genre, just as Antonioni’s inherently incomplete plots inform his spatial and temporal filmic aesthetics. Many have noticed a connection between unfinished infrastructure projects, clientelism, corruption, and organized crime: the works’ ability to remain perpetually “in progress” is precisely their point.

We welcome papers in English that explore the viability of incompleteness as a theoretical notion across media, its scope as a technique that may or may not solicit a specific hermeneutical strategy, and finally its implications as a political and philosophical concept.

Possible topics may include:

- Unfinished works and their textual tradition

- Infrastructural incompleteness and organized crime

- A poetics of non-finito

- Reaching perfection in art

- Incompleteness across media

- Incompleteness as a narrative device

- Pastiche/Patchworks vs. Incompleteness

- Hermeneutical strategies facing incompleteness

- Incomplete plots/spaces/times

- Incompleteness vs. Failure 

Please send a 250-word abstract in English and a brief bio (50-60 words) no later than November, 20th to: graditalian.columbia@gmail.com

Kindest regards,

The Conference Organizers

Carlo Arrigoni

Nassime Chida

Massimiliano Delfino

Matteo Pace

Uses of the Past: Cultural Memory in and of the Middle Ages

The Twenty-Ninth Annual Spring Symposium of the Medieval Studies Institute of Indiana University

3–4 March, 2017

Indiana University, Bloomington

How is the past used (and abused) in the middle ages? To what purposes is it deployed in personal, social, religious, and political formation? And how has the medieval served as a foundational past for identities and practices in post-medieval periods? Recent scholarship demonstrates the importance of the past in the creation of medieval identity. In the words of Walter Pohl and Ian Wood, the past could be used “to create legitimacy, explain inclusion and exclusion, establish precedent, provide orientation, exemplify moral exhortation, inspire a sense of what was possible and what was not, to negotiate status, to argue about the right norms or to imagine the future.” Moreover, the medieval past has become a touchstone of current cultural memory, deployed in constructing the past of our own present moment.

The Medieval Studies Institute of Indiana University welcomes scholars from a range of disciplines and objects: history, literature, music; material artifacts and spaces; religion, politics, and law. We are especially interested in papers that explore global perspectives on cultural memory and the use of the past.

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to Sean Tandy (smtandy@indiana.edu) by January 15th, 2016

Marco Manuscript Workshop 2017
"Envisioning Knowledge"
February 3-4, 2017
Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Twelfth Marco Manuscript Workshop will be held Friday and Saturday, February 3-4, 2017, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; the workshop is organized by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English).

For this year’s workshop we invite papers that explore the idea of "Envisioning Knowledge." Some manuscripts contain sacred texts, brilliantly illuminated; some preserve literary treasures, adorned with elaborately decorated initials. Other manuscripts have a more practical function, from recording transactions of land or service, to collecting medical recipes or geographical lore, to marking days and years, to charting the scope of the earth or the course of the heavens. These manuscripts may have a more utilitarian appearance, but they often supplement their textual content with diagrams and illustrations, charts and maps, tables and lists. Such manuscripts preserve the beginnings of modern science, and they are important to the development of the visual display of information and the transmission of both practical and speculative knowledge. The makers of these books were inventing ways to use the visual space of the page to represent, in one way or another, some truth about the world and their understanding of it. We welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined.

The workshop is open to scholars and students at any rank and in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more like a class than a conference; participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer both practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together towards developing better professional skills for textual and codicological work. We particularly invite the presentation of works in progress, unusual manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts. Presenters will receive a stipend of $500 for their participation.

The deadline for applications is November 4, 2016. Applicants are asked to submit a current CV and a two-page letter describing their project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to <rliuzza@utk.edurliuzza@utk.edu

>>, or by mail to the Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430. The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who do not wish to present their own work but are interested in sharing a lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies. Further details will be available later in the year; please contact Roy Liuzza for more information.

The Irish government plans to ‘temporarily’ accommodate the the Irish Senate ( Seanad Éireann) in the Ceramics Room of Kildare Street branch of the National Museum of Ireland.  An office accommodating three curators from the National Museum will also be needed as a fire escape route. This is to be for at least two years while the Senate Chamber is renovated. The Museum’s Ceramics Room is the venue for the great variety of lectures and other public outreach events which museum staff have managed to provide, free of charge, over many years despite drastic and on-going cuts to their budgets. 

The Irish Arts Review is organizing a petition addressed to the Irish Prime Minister (An Taoiseach), asking the government to halt this planned relocation of the Seanad.

If you are happy to support this campaign please sign the petition and pass the link on (http://www.irishartsreview.com/threat-to-the-national-museum-join-the-appeal/?utm_source=Beit+List).

 

Niamh Whitfield

The Irish government plans to ‘temporarily’ accommodate the the Irish Senate ( Seanad Éireann) in the Ceramics Room of Kildare Street branch of the National Museum of Ireland.  An office accommodating three curators from the National Museum will also be needed as a fire escape route. This is to be for at least two years while the Senate Chamber is renovated. The Museum’s Ceramics Room is the venue for the great variety of lectures and other public outreach events which museum staff have managed to provide, free of charge, over many years despite drastic and on-going cuts to their budgets. 

The Irish Arts Review is organizing a petition addressed to the Irish Prime Minister (An Taoiseach), asking the government to halt this planned relocation of the Seanad.

If you are happy to support this campaign please sign the petition and pass the link on (http://www.irishartsreview.com/threat-to-the-national-museum-join-the-appeal/?utm_source=Beit+List).

 

Niamh Whitfield

nimals in the Archives

October 27–28, 2016

University of Pennsylvania

Description

This two-day symposium brings leading figures in animal history together with Philadelphia-based archivists to theorize the historical traces that animals leave behind. The symposium focuses on how animals come to be represented textually, visually, and materially in historical archives—both dead (as in leather bindings, parchment made from animal skins, iron-gall inks, hide and bone glues, and taxidermy specimens) and very much alive (as in bookworms, silverfish, mice, and other archival “pests” that eat the bindings, adhesives, and other substances in library and archival collections).

By thinking through the stakes of nonhuman animal representation in archives, the symposium addresses both the history of human-animal relationships across time and the theory and practice of history and archival classification. It aims to provide a broader view of the human past and to reconsider the anthropocentric biases of conventional historical practice, while also exploring methodological questions about the possibility of history beyond the human.

More information here: https://archivesmonthphilly.com/2016/01/01/animals-in-the-archives-symposium-october-27-28-2016/

Schedule

Thursday, October 27, 2016 | 6:00–8:00pm

Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street

Screening of the documentary film “Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness” (1931).

In the late 1920s, Eldridge Reeves Johnson, inventor and former corporate magnate, developed a relationship with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology that would indirectly result in pioneering work in film technology history. In 1930, Captain Vladimir Perfilieff, a Russian-born artist and adventurer, and John S. Clarke, friend and former classmate of Johnson, asked him to fund a zoological and ethnographic expedition to be undertaken and filmed in the Mato Grosso plateau of Brazil. “Matto Grosso” is the result of this joint expedition, which documents the people, animals, and environment of the region. Penn Museum archivists will introduce and contextualize the film.

The 49-minute screening will be followed by a roundtable from 7:00 to 8:00pm on the topic of animals and film.

For more information, see: http://www.penn.museum/sites/mattogrosso/

Friday, October 28, 2016 | 10:00am–5:00pm

LGBT Center, 3907 Spruce Street

A series of talks will further explore the theme of “Animals in the Archives.” In the morning and the afternoon there will be presentations by five speakers: Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia), Iris Montero (Brown University), Rebecca Woods (University of Toronto), Nigel Rothfels (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) and Neel Ahuja (University of California, Santa Cruz). At 1:00pm we will hold a roundtable on “The Materiality of Animal Archives” featuring scholars and Philadelphia-based archivists.

The symposium will be followed by a public reception at 5:30pm.

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Organized by Etienne Benson, Carolyn Fornoff, and Zeb Tortorici.

Sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Penn Humanities Forum, Penn Year of Media, South Asia Center, Department of English, Department of History and Sociology of Science, and Department of History.

Dear all

With apologies for cross-posting, please find attached a Call for Papers for a conference to be held in Bochum on 17^th and 18^th June 2017, titled “Strangers at the Gate! The (un)welcome movement of people and ideas in the medieval world”.

Papers in English from all disciplines and geographical areas are warmly welcomed, as are submissions from graduate students and early career researchers.

All best

Simon

Dr S. C. Thomson

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

Lehrstuhl für Mediävistik und Sprachwissenschaften

Englisches Seminar der Ruhr-Universität Bochum

FNO 02 / 79

Universitätsstr. 150

44801 Bochum

Tel.: +49 (0)  234 32 22598