To submit an abstract, visit the ICMS website. All abstracts are due on September 15.  

Boccaccio and Boccaccian Medievalisms: Representations of Gender in Medieval Storytelling

This session seeks to interrogate representations of gender inspired by the works of Giovanni Boccaccio. In the proem of the Decameron, the Boccaccio-narrator promises that his hundred short stories will ease Fortune’s blows to the dilicate donne who - according to him - suffer from the trials of heartache. Beyond the text, the cento novelle and its themes have been adapted into visual form. From painted cassoni to Federico Fellini’s towering Anita Ekberg in Boccaccio ‘70, the Decameron continually informs medievalisms of gender, including themes like sartorial disguise, social structure and domesticity, and labor.

Organizer: Anna Dini

The Lyric Subject and Subjectivity in Global Petrarch(s) and Petrarchism(s)

This panel invites innovative approaches to Petrarch’s oeuvre addressing the global reach and expanse of Petrarch and/or Petrarchism as reflected in: Petrarch's work itself; his intertextual engagement with other literary and linguistic traditions; critique, and intertextual responses to Petrarch's work. Challenging longstanding perceptions of an “insular” Petrarch, this panel considers the sociopolitical, transhistorical, comparative, inter- and plurilinguistic frameworks that lend to understandings of a more capacious Petrarch—a Petrarch who can be read “globally” in his Latin and vernacular work representing the lyric subject or critiquing lyric subjectivity. Critical approaches engaging with contemporary theory or considering non-western texts/frameworks are especially welcome.

Organizers: Alani Hicks-Bartlett & Alejandro Cuadrado

Landscapes Lost and Found: Navigating in and out of the Medieval Italian City

This panel seeks to feature scholars whose work analyzes how medieval Italian literature, art, and culture represent and interrogate the relationship between humans, cities, and their environments. Emphasizing interdisciplinary dialogue, we welcome a wide range of critical approaches—from ecocriticism and environmental history to political geography, art history, and the study of space and mobility. By bringing together diverse methodologies, the panel aims to foster conversation across disciplines and time periods. We especially encourage contributions that draw connections between medieval representations of movement, place, and boundaries, and contemporary questions of climate, migration, and the human shaping of landscape.

Organizers: Alexander Brock & Toni Veneri

Italian Footnotes

This session aims to bring together scholars who are working on medieval Italian conceptions of the foot. While scholarship on other parts of the human body (hair, eyes, heart, skin, internal organs, etc.) is robust, this panel asks scholars from across disciplines to consider the place of the humble foot in the imaginations of late medieval Italians. From the metrical foot to the bare feet of many mendicant and popular religious orders, what are the religious, artistic, poetic, and historical valences of the foot, real and imagined? We invite papers from scholars of all disciplines using a range of methodologies.

Organizers: Alani Hicks-Bartlett & Alejandro Cuadrado