cfp.english.upenn.edu

Melville and Rome
Empire – Democracy – Belief – Art
The Eighth International Melville Conference
Rome: 22-26 June 2011
PRESENTED BY
The Melville Society
in collaboration with
The Department of Foreign Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
University of Rome (Sapienza)

We invite you to submit proposals for papers and to take part in the Eighth International Melville Conference that will take place at the University of Rome (Sapienza) from June 22 to June 26, 2011. The five-day conference (including tours of Melville sites in Rome and a day-trip to Naples) will focus on four words that come to mind when one thinks of Melville, an indefatigable excursionist, “doing” Rome: Empire, Democracy, Belief, Art.

Suggested topics for papers include:
 Melville’s relation to Europe, European politics, and especially modern Italian and Mediterranean culture and politics (for example, the Italian Risorgimento)
 Melville’s interest in the literature of Europe and of the Greek and Roman worlds
 Melville and the fate of Democracy
 Melville, the Grand Tour, and travel; including any focus on other American travelers
 Melville’s poetry set in Italy and the Mediterranean
 Melville in revision: Writer, Genre, Text
 The impact of religion (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, et al.)
 Melville’s use of Classical mythology
 Melville as Collector of Italian and European art
 The presence and uses of Melville abroad, in European (or non-American) literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
 The uses of Melville, especially in Italian literature
 Melville’s critique of Empire and War
 Melville studies in a global context; in Media; in the Classroom
 Melville in translation; his Reception abroad
 The current state of Melville studies
 Editing Melville: the achievement of recent textual, digital, and philological scholarship

Please send a letter of intent and a 1-2 page abstract (single spaced) to Giorgio Mariani, Gordon Poole, and John Bryant (giorgio.mariani@uniroma1.it; go.poole@libero.it; engjlb@hofstra.edu).

The deadline for submission of proposals is September 15, 2010.