CFP - MLA 2027, "Translation as an Emancipatory Practice in Italian Literary and Cultural History”

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

Proposal Abstract:
Translation can be understood as an emancipatory practice in its own right: a means of liberating texts from linguistic, national, or disciplinary boundaries, and of opening them to new publics, epistemologies, and cultural or political uses. Across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, translation in the Italian context has served as a site of intellectual exchange, transformation, and contestation, enabling acts of rewriting, adaptation, and recontextualization across time and space.

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on translation as both a historical practice and a living, theoretical problem in Italian literary and cultural history. How did translation function as a vehicle for intellectual emancipation, cultural mediation, or ideological transformation in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries? How did translators historically negotiate authority, fidelity, creativity, and power? And how do contemporary translators working with texts from this period continue to confront these same questions today? What forms of knowledge, liberation, or ethical engagement can emerge through the act of translating early modern and modern Italian texts in the present?

By bringing together scholars and practicing translators, this roundtable seeks to foster an open conversation about translation as an intellectual, cultural, and ethical practice—one that operates both within the historical contexts of our period and in contemporary engagements with its texts.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

• Translation as cultural, political, or intellectual mediation
• Rewriting, adaptation, and creative transformation
• Translation and the circulation of texts across periods, regions, and publics
• Early modern and modern theories of translation
• Translation and questions of authority, authorship, and fidelity
• Translation across genres, disciplines, and media
• Translation as resistance, appropriation, or reinterpretation
• Contemporary translation projects engaging texts from the period

This roundtable welcomes contributions from scholars and translators working in literature, history, philosophy, and cultural studies, and encourages dialogue between historical inquiry and present-day translation practice.

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 (viola.ardeni@csus.edu).

Please send an abstract or statement of interest 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).