The 15th Annual Harvard-Brown Graduate Student Conference in Italian Studies

Brown University, April 5 - 6, 2024
“Contested Bodies in Italian Studies”

On behalf of the graduate students of the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University and the Italian
Section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, we are pleased to
announce the fifteenth edition of Chiasmi – Graduate Students conference, to be held on 5-6 April 2024, at
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Call for Papers
Bodies, like the very field of Italian studies, are interdisciplinary texts. But what is a body? And what does it
mean to the identity that it helps constitute? The conference Contested Bodies in Italian Studies seeks to expand
on and problematize the conceptions of bodies as they apply to and construct our society, literature, and
scholarship.
In 2023, bodies are more contested than ever: from migrant bodies lost to disasters in the Mediterranean to
queer bodies erased from school curriculums, from Dante’s “corpi aerei” to Gianni Celati’s “corpo comico,”
from Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life” to Silvia Federici’s “periphery of the skin,” this conference positions itself
at a nexus of theory and praxis, scholarship and creative production, to examine what bodies have meant over
time and what they might mean going forward. Furthermore, our inquiry will be encouraged by a keynote
address by Somali-Italian author Ubah Cristina Ali Farah.
Taking into account the expansiveness of the body as a construction—including political bodies, embodied
identities, disabled bodies, and even bodies of work—we invite graduate scholars working in all disciplines
related to the Italian context to, paraphrasing a contention of Foucault, “trace the body with language and
dissolve it with ideas” by joining us in conversation about the importance of our contested bodies and retrieve
them from their perpetually disintegrating state.
We are accepting contributions from disciplines such as Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Gender Studies,
Race Studies, Art History, History, Literature, Philosophy, Environmental Humanities, and Media Studies aslong as they have a connection with the realm of Italian culture.

Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes (approximately 8-10 pages of double-spaced text) and may
be in Italian or English.

Please send an abstract (no longer than 300 words) with the title of your paper, your name, affiliation,
contact information (including telephone and e-mail address), and technical equipment needed as a Microsoft
Word file attachment to chiasmi@brown.edu. Please format subject line “[Last name] - Chiasmi 2024.”

Submission deadline: January 31, 2024, 23:59 EST