CFP - MLA 2027, "Science and Intellectual Emancipation in Italian Literary and Cultural History”

Panel Sponsor: Forum on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century Italian

Proposal Abstract:
Scientific thought has long played a central role in narratives of intellectual emancipation in Italian literary and cultural history. From Galileo and his interlocutors to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment engagements with empiricism, medicine, psychology, and emerging technologies, scientific paradigms have offered both tools for liberation and sources of anxiety, contestation, or resistance. Literature and cultural production in early modern and modern Italy frequently negotiate the promises and limits of scientific knowledge, staging encounters between reason and authority, observation and belief, innovation and tradition. Scientific paradigms in this period could function both as tools of intellectual emancipation and as mechanisms of exclusion or hierarchy, particularly in relation to racialized, colonized, or non-European subjects.

This panel invites papers that explore the relationship between science and intellectual emancipation across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. How did scientific discourses shape new forms of intellectual autonomy, ethical inquiry, or social critique? How did writers and thinkers engage with, translate, adapt, or resist scientific models of knowledge? In what ways did scientific paradigms intersect with broader cultural, religious, political, or aesthetic frameworks? By foregrounding science as both a historical practice and a cultural problem, this panel seeks to foster interdisciplinary conversations that cut across periods and methodologies.

We invite papers that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Literary engagements with scientific thought, empiricism, or experimental knowledge
• Galileo and the cultural afterlives of scientific authority
• Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment science in Italian intellectual history
• Enlightenment universalism and its limits: science as both emancipatory and restrictive, including its implications for race, empire, and non-European knowledge systems
• Medicine, psychology, and the sciences of the mind
• Technology, material culture, and changing conceptions of knowledge
• Narratives of progress, crisis, or resistance to scientific paradigms
• Science, religion, and competing models of truth
• Translation, mediation, and the circulation of scientific ideas

This panel welcomes contributions from scholars working in literature, history, philosophy, history of science, and cultural studies, and encourages approaches that place scientific discourse in dialogue with broader narratives of intellectual emancipation.

Submission Deadline: March 9, 2026

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words together with a short bio to Bradford Masoni (bradford.a.masoni@gmail.com) or Viola Ardeni (mrsviolin2011@gmail.com).