Friday, 10 June 2022

Dora Allman Room, The Hub, University College Cork 

10.30 Tea & Coffee

11.00 Welcome: Daragh O’Connell, Head of Department of Italian, UCC

11.10-12.10

Chair: Jacopo Turini, UCC

1. Guido Bartolini, UCC, Reading and Misreading Fascism: The Reception of Moravia’s Il conformista and Pratolini’s Un eroe del nostro tempo
2. Mara Josi, UCD, Rome, 16 October 1943. History, Memory, Literature
3. Ana Stefanovska, UCC, Literary Space in Italian Neorealism

12.15-1.00

Chair: Noreen Kane, UCC

1. Serena Laiena UCD, Actresses in Commedia dell'Arte (1560-1680): A Social Revolution
2. Cecilia Brioni, TCD, Female Creators on YouTube Italia: Gender, Authenticity, Professionalism

1.00-2.00 Lunch: UCC Staff Rest

2.00-3.00 Keynote speaker: Deborah Amberson, University of Florida, Thinking Italian Olives: Giovanni Boine, La Voce, and Rooted Modernism

Chair: Mark Chu, UCC

Abstract: Writing in 1911 of the crisis facing the olive producers of the Ligurian province of Imperia, Giovanni Boine advances a model of Italian national culture rooted in agricultural practices and traditions. Published in the pages of La Voce (1908-1916), Boine’s vision of a biocultural entanglement of human, plant, and earth complements the eclecticism of the journal’s view of Italian cultural modernity, specifically the focus on the local and the regional. Boine’s biocultural vision also invites broader reflection on critical configurations of Modernism as a whole. Traditionally seen as an urban and transnational movement, more recent scholarly work has proposed a greening of Modernism, a sort of critical proposal to reconceive modernist artistic production as the expression of a world that is not exclusively human. Boine’s meditations on Ligurian olives together with his poetics of autobiographical fragments suggest a programmatic challenge to conceptual and narrative hierarchies constructed on the subordination of the natural world to the adventures of human protagonists, opening the way to posit a more-than-human Italian Modernism. 

3.00-3.45

Chair: Dario Galassini, UCC

1. Lorenzo Dell’Oso, TCD, How Dante became Dante: exploring the intellectual formation of a Medieval layman
2. Leyla Livraghi, UCC, The rediscovery of Livy’s Decades from Dante to Petrarch and Boccaccio

3.45-4.00 Tea & Coffee

Chair: Marco Ceravolo, UCC

1. Paolo Saporito, UCC, Positively Modern: Michelangelo Antonioni and Affirmative Cinematic Ecologies 
2. Andrea Ciribuco, NUIG, Languages and landscapes of asylum in contemporary Italy

Participants and audience are then welcome to go as a group to a local pub (location tba).