Symposia Archives - Interdisciplinary Italy

Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde: Symposium CfP

Giuliana Pieri — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:32:47 +0000

One-day Symposium – Call for Papers

Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde

Tuesday 11 November 2025, 9.30 – 18.00

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

Organised to coincide with the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s brief yet stimulating career, Royal Holloway University of London and the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art invite 250-word proposals for cross-disciplinary papers of 20 minutes, or short work-in-progress papers of 10 minutes, taking the above themes as a starting point and exploring them in the context of art history and literary or cultural studies.

Themes for investigation might include, but are not limited to:

New readings of La Rocca’s work
Intermedia experimentation in Italy c. 1960–75
Italian feminism in the 1960s and 1970s

All proposals should be sent to symposium@estorickcollection.com by 31 August 2025.

See the full Call for Paper below.

Ketty La Rocca call for papers

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Engaged Visuality: The Italian and Belgian Poesia Visiva Phenomenon in the 60s and 70s (International Symposium)

Maria Elena Minuto — Fri, 14 May 2021 10:14:05 +0000

We would like to call the attention to the call for contribution for the International Symposium Engaged Visuality: The Italian and Belgian Poesia Visiva Phenomenon in the 60s and 70s, which will take place at the Academia Belgica and Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza on December 16-17, 2021.

In a historical and cultural moment, in which poetry could present itself as “phono-, ideo-, typo-, icono, photographical; mono-, stereo-, quadro-, ambiophonic; phonographic, bioscopic, kinetic; kinesic, eatable, odorous, tangible” (H. Damen, 1972), the international and countercultural experiences of Italian and Belgian visual poets drew a cutting-edge roadmap within the wider and multifaceted context of neo-avant-garde experimental poetry of the 1960s and 1970s by creating a unique model of interdisciplinary cooperation where verbivocovisual research, media discourses, and social criticism strongly converged. Combining insights from the fields of art history, literary criticism, and media studies, “Engaged Visuality” investigates the impact of new media, political imagery, and technologies on poesia visiva phenomenon by focusing on a bilateral case study rarely analyzed from a comparative and transcultural perspective: the foundation of the international poetry magazine “Lotta Poetica” (first series: 1971-75) by Sarenco and Paul De Vree, i.e., the aim of Italian and Belgian interartistic exchanges, co-authored initiatives, and cross-disciplinary inquiries.

Organised by Maria Elena Minuto (Université de Liège; KU Leuven) and Jan De Vree (M HKA Museum, Antwerp), the symposium is supported by a multitude of European institutions and research teams. Interdisciplinary Italy is present in the person of Professor Giuliana Pieri, who is part of the Scientific Committee.

For further details about the event and how to apply, please consult the Symposium’s concept.

Submissions deadline: June 30, 2021

Paul De Vree, Hysteria Makes History, 1973. Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community Â© M HKA

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Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages: Theories, Methodologies and Future Perspectives

Emanuela Patti — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 19:51:36 +0000

The ‘digital turn in the humanities’ has inevitably raised a number of questions about how digital technologies have transformed research, teaching and dissemination in Modern Languages. While hybridity still tends to dominate our teaching and research methods and objects of study – we mix traditional/analogue and new/digital practices to acquire knowledge and develop skills -, digital technologies are significantly changing the way we understand literacies and pedagogy; publishing, research materials, our objects of study, and the notion of ‘culture’.

In order to discuss these transformations in our subject, on 15th February 2019, the Centre for Visual Culture at Royal Holloway hosted a one-day international symposium titled ‘Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages’ (see programme below), co-organised by Emanuela Patti and Giuliana Pieri as part of the Humanities and Arts Research Institute programme of events (HARI) on ‘Digital Culture & Creativity’. This symposium aimed to explore theories, methodologies and future perspectives in the field of digital culture and creativity in Modern Languages, by bringing together scholars in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, as well as artists, Media Arts historians and curators. We had the honour and pleasure to discuss these questionsÂ with a wonderful line-up of speakers, including the two keynote Claire Taylor (Liverpool) and Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), together with Paul Spence (King’s College), Erika Fülöp (Lancaster), Valentino Catricalà (Media Arts Festival), María Mencía (Kingston), and our chairs James Williams (Royal Holloway), Sarah Wright (Royal Holloway), Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester).

The overarching question of the symposium, as Emanuela Patti highlighted, was how to address the new wave of interdisciplinarity in Modern Languages which has been rapidly triggered by digital convergence. Arguably, Modern Languages, Digital Humanities and Digital Culture & Creativity intersect in new forms. What are already very ‘interdisciplinary disciplines’ such as digital humanities, electronic literature, media/digital arts, post-cinema collide and merge in different ways. As scholars and teachers of modern languages, cultures and societies, we are in fact increasingly exposed to texts and ‘signifying practices’ which are digitally-born or mix media, as it typically happens in the era of convergence culture. What forms of collaboration could we envisage between DH, ML and Digital Culture and Creativity?

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Programme

Friday, 15 February 2019

10.30 Arrival, Refreshments

11.00-11.10 Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway), Introduction

Modern languages and the digital: theories, methodologies, case studies

11.10-12.00 (chair: Sarah Wright, Royal Holloway)

Keynote Lecture 1: Claire Taylor (University of Liverpool), ‘Digital Humanities, digital culture, and Modern Languages’

12.00-13.00 (chair: Guyda Armstrong, University of Manchester)

Paul Spence (King’s College), ‘Key elements of a critical Digital Humanities-Modern Languages (DHML) research agenda’

Erika Fülöp (Lancaster), ‘Digital culture in French Studies in the UK’

13.00-14.00 Lunch

Modern Languages and digital arts: national and transnational perspectives

14.10-15.00 (chair: James Williams, Royal Holloway)

Keynote Lecture 2: Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), ‘Telegraph, Airmail, Satellite: The Visual Imaginary of Global Media’

15.00-16.00 (chair: Emanuela Patti, Royal Holloway)

Valentino Catricalà (Media Arts Festival, Rome), ‘Rethinking the medium through media art. The Italian case’

María Mencía (Kingston), ‘The Winnipeg: the poem that crossed the Atlantic’

16.00-16.30 Coffee break

16.30-17.00 (chair: Emanuela Patti)

Closing discussion, ‘The interdisciplinary challenges of Digital Culture Studies: what forms of collaboration between Modern Languages, Media Arts and Digital Humanities?’

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Upcoming Conference: Interart/Intermedia Experimentation in Italy through the Ages (from the Medieval Age to the Present)

Interdisciplinary Italy — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 17:56:58 +0000

Title of the Conference:

Interart/Intermedia experimentation in Italy through the ages (from the medieval age to the present)

Dates and Venue
April 12-13, 2019; Royal Holloway

In collaboration with
School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin
School of European Languages, Culture and Society, UCL
AHRC project ‘Interdisciplinary Italy’ (www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org)
AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council)
Organisers: Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, Giuliana Pieri, Emanuela Patti.

Description:
This conference explores interartistic and intermedial encounters in Italy and the new kinds of experimentation that arise from these. It will focus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing and on institutions who fostered or hindered interartistic and intermedial exchange. It may subvert widely accepted canons as what looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one.

We welcome proposals from established scholars, early career researchers, and PhD students from all disciplines.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. Interartistic and intermedial, experimentation and creativity.
How does intermedial and interartistic practice work to enhance creativity? What are its links with experimentation? Why does it arise?

2. Mapping and rewriting the cultural canon
How does looking at artists and artworks from an intermedial/interartistic perspective reshape the map of what is central and what is peripheral? Which artists have been lost to cultural histories because their work falls into the interstices between the arts?

3. Historical change
How has working between two or more arts has been received or marginalised across the ages? What is instrumental in this change? Why does this take place? What kind of interartistic practice is taking place in medieval Italy, in the Renaissance or later? Are there particular periods in Italy’s history in which explosions of interartistic practice take place and why?

4. Boundary crossing
How are borders between the arts policed and why? How have institutions in Italy played a part in shaping what fits, or does not, in certain artistic tradition? How do we best investigate the process of dialogue/translation/remediation involved in border crossings between the arts?

5. Collaboration and communities
How might interartistic and intermedial practice bring artists together? Why do groups come together and how? How does the collaborative making of artworks across boundaries differ from solitary practice? How might transmedia practice – and the fandom associated with it – make us think differently about readers and about artistic and literary communities?

6. Theories of interartistic practice and intermediality
How has thinking in Italy contributed to the international debate on intermediality and on interartistic practice?

7. Bad practice
How does intermedial and interartistic practice threaten the stability of artistic forms and disciplines? Are there negative implications to be considered? What are the risks and dangers of intermedia?

The main goal of this conference is to look at Italian culture from an intermedial perspective (rather than a multimedial, or multiartistic one) to understand how the bringing together of two or more art forms, or two or more artists working across art forms have changed creative production in Italy, and indeed beyond, from the medieval age to the present. We plan to publish selected papers from the conference in an edited volume.

To register, please go to:

https://onlinestore.rhul.ac.uk/product-catalogue/events-and-conferences/modern-languages/interartintermedia-experimentation-in-italy

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