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Call for Submissions: Volume 7

California Italian Studies is now accepting submissions for its seventh volume. Submissions may be for either the thematic or the open-theme sections of the volume (see below), in either English or Italian. The deadline for submission to this volume is April 30, 2016.

Please direct inquiries to: mwaller@ucr.eduaohealy@lmu.edu
Submissions may be made directly through the California Italian Studies home page: escholarship.org/uc/ismrg_cisj

Part I: Scholarly essays, articles, interviews, translations, which address some aspect of the special topic:

Moving Images: Cinema, Pre-cinema, Around Cinema, New Media.

This thematic issue focuses on “moving images” from antiquity to the present. Submissions taking a variety of interdisciplinary, aesthetic, historical, theoretical, sociological, or other perspectives on the significance of moving images to Italian culture (broadly understood) are invited.

Italian culture has a long and intricate history of visual culture, both sacred and secular. Even before technology enabled images to move across cinema screens, the dynamic grammar and syntax of moving images were evoked by Etruscan and Roman tomb frescoes, mosaic programs and fresco cycles. The poetics of Dante’s Commedia, civic and religious processions, ekphrastic writing, magic lanterns, and Baroque aesthetics also drew on the kinetic potential of the visual image. We invite submissions that address any aspect of this history.

We also welcome submissions that address subsequent developments of the moving image in Italian culture. Italian cinema has inherited a rich visual legacy and has proved influential on both local and global imaginaries, opening spaces for visionary and engaged filmmaking throughout the world. Further, with the advent of the world wide web and the proliferation of digital media, dramatic new possibilities for the preservation of, and access to, historically and geographically remote materials are reconfiguring relations between old and new, center and periphery, oral and written, history and memory.

Images also move in the sense of traveling.  Submissions may address how they cross borders, change hands, are copied, imitated, disseminated, appropriated, incorporated, shattered, scattered, censored, and lost entirely.

Part II. Scholarly essays, articles, interviews, and translations with a significant Italian component on any topic that meets one or more of the following basic criteria:

  1. interdisciplinary work that either combines within itself the practices of multiple disciplines, makes significant use of the tools of one discipline in the service of another; or relates to a cluster of other scholarly works representing the approaches of multiple disciplines to a single topic;
  2. comparative work placing the study of history, culture, society, artistic products, and languages of the Italian peninsula and islands, and of Italian diasporas, in relation to other geographical, cultural, and linguistic formations;
  3. critically reflexive work, which not only studies a given object but also engages in theoretical and/or methodological reflection on its own approach and on its implications within larger disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts.