Call for Papers -- The Sixteenth Century Society: A Society for Early Modern Studies

Portland, Oregon, October 30 - November 1, 2025

The Sixteenth Century Society (SCS) is pleased to invite proposals for individual presentations, panels, roundtables, and workshops for its annual conference which will take place at the Hilton Portland Downtown Hotel. Please note that this conference will begin on Thursday morning and end on Saturday evening. The deadline for submissions is May 2, 2025.
 
The Sixteenth Century Society promotes a broad range of scholarship on the early modern era (c. 1450-c. 1750). We encourage submissions from international scholars and warmly welcome advanced graduate students, independent and early-career scholars, and postdoctoral researchers.

For more information about the SCSC, please see the conference website: https://sixteenthcentury.org/conference/.

Please consider submitting an abstract for the following panels in the Italian Studies Discipline.

PANEL -- Censors, Censorship, and Self-Censorship in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Efficacy of Oppression and Strategies of Resistance

This panel welcomes papers which explore the role that censors, censorship, and self-censorship played in shaping the literary and print traditions in early modern Italy and Europe. Topics may include but are not limited to: the strategies of resistance employed by writers and printers to avoid censorship, including transnational collaborations; the efficacy or failure of the tools of censorship such as Indexes of Prohibited Books, economic and civil sanctions; how censorship reshaped canonical texts like Boccaccio’s Decameron; translation and/as censorship; gender, censorship, and self-censorship; the role of transnational collaboration as a strategy of resistance; literary or visual presentations of censorship or spaces that resist censorship (e.g. gardens, private gatherings, exchanges in a trusted community).  

Please send abstracts of 250 words or less and a brief bio to Suzanne.Magnanini@colorado.edu by April 12 and also submit abstract and bio under “Individual Paper Proposals” at the following link: https://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference/

(select Italian Studies under Discipline on the second page, not Sponsor Organization on the first)

ROUNDTABLE -- How should we teach Italian culture of the long sixteenth century today?

In a moment in which national paradigms are making way for a variety of new perspectives (transnational, global, Mediterranean) in Italian Studies and Italian programs are facing consolidation and absorption into larger departments and schools, what is the best way to teach Italian culture of the long sixteenth century? Where does Italy fit in courses adopting non-national, plurilingual, or thematic approaches? Can we still teach regional Italian (Venetian, Neapolitan, Roman) topics in such courses? This roundtable welcomes brief practical and theoretical interventions (5-10 minutes) that address these and related questions aimed at sparking discussion among participants.  

Please send abstracts of 250 words or less and a brief bio to Suzanne.Magnanini@colorado.edu by April 12 and also submit abstract and bio under “Individual Paper Proposals” at the following link: https://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference/

(select Italian Studies under Discipline on the second page, not Sponsor Organization on the first)

PANEL --  Hybrid Genres Between Text and Image

This session explores hybrid genres at the intersection of text and image in the early modern era (1450-1750). Focusing on the production, reception, and interpretation of visual-textual combinations, the panel analyzes their material, social, and ideological components. In a critical negotiation of paragone, intense relationships between the verbal and the visual shaped these hybrid genres, which require hermeneutic approaches based on both media. Maps, popular prints, emblems, schoolbooks, almanacs, etc., represented effective means to develop knowledge and promote ideologies. These works disseminated trends as well as norms of societal and individual conduct, revived classical references, and provided useful details about a specific topic. They addressed a wide range of audiences, both lay and religious, and satisfied their demand for conceits, allegories, morality, and historical knowledge. Viewers were called to interpret the message of such examples by drawing upon their own experience and memory. Ultimately, readers reenacted knowledge in their personal, social, and intellectual practices. Intimately connected to the community that crafted them, these genres reflected the context in which they were conceived, developing their designs over time, defying space, and producing a wealth of examples and intertextual references.

Please submit abstracts of 250 words or less and a brief bio to Daniela D’Eugenio, University of Arkansas (deugeni@uark.edu) by April 12 and also submit abstract and bio under “Individual Paper Proposals” at the following link: https://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference/

(select Italian Studies under Discipline on the second page, not Sponsor Organization on the first)

PANEL -- Cartographic Writing in Italy, 1450-1750

This session explores the presence of a mapping impulse in 15th- and 16th-century prose and poetry. As Robert T. Tally observes, maps have long served as organizing principles for narratives, linking histories of people and places to broader anthropological contexts. The relationship between cartography and literary production underwent a significant shift following the translation of Ptolemy's Geographia, which shaped Western cosmography and geographic thought. Adopting a geocritical approach, this panel welcomes papers on cartographic writing in Early Modern Italian literature. Topics may include, but are not limited to, odeporic literature, expressions of spatial awareness, and the rhetorical power of mapping across literary genres.

Please send abstracts of 250 words or less and a brief bio to Maria Sole Costanzo at costanmh@bc.edu by April 12 and also submit abstract and bio under “Individual Paper Proposals” at the following link: https://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference/

(select Italian Studies under Discipline on the second page, not Sponsor Organization on the first)

PANEL -- Early Modern Italian Women

This panel invites papers that consider texts by or about women in the early modern period.

Please send abstracts of 250 words or less and a brief bio to jennifer_haraguchi@byu.edu by April 12 and also submit abstract and bio under “Individual Paper Proposals” at the following link: https://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference/

(select Italian Studies under Discipline on the second page, not Sponsor Organization on the first)