The 12th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) 2024

Image 'Street art in Rome, Italy' by Felvalen via Wiki Commons

Date & time

Wed 03 Jul 2024, 9am – Sat 06 Jul 2024, 5pm

Location

ANU Campus - Location TBC

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Location

Italian Studies for Global Challenges: Transdisciplinary Conversations.
The 12th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) 2024

The Australian National University, Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country
3–6 July 2024

Convenor: Francesco Ricatti
Advisory committee: Theodore Ell, Tom Geue, Katrina Lolicato, Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli AM.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Chiara Beccalossi and Camilla Hawthorne.
Plenary event: Italian/Indigenous relations in the Australian context (details to be announced).

Proposals now due by the 21^st of January 2024 (final deadline) to acis2024@anu.edu.au
See details under "Papers".

The conference will take place at the Australian National University, on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present. We acknowledge First Nations’ struggles for Sovereignty and Country.

The 12^th Biennial ACIS Conference invites perspectives on Italian Studies as a field of enquiry with a role to play in facing the challenges that continue to intensify in our highly globalised world – those cultural, political, economic, and environmental challenges demanding consideration and bold address.

The ACIS Italian Studies for Global Challenges conference aims for an open, multifaceted, and nuanced exploration of Italian Studies’ role in illuminating and influencing cultural and social challenges that are shaped by globalisation but also grounded in particular localities, and histories. The conference is thus interested in any discipline, historical period, topic, theme, theory, performing art, methodology and pedagogy that are relevant to Italian Studies. Conference participants are encouraged to articulate with purpose, courage and creativity how and why their teaching, research, art, and community work matter right now.

The goal of the conference is to foster transformative connections between researchers in Italian Studies as most broadly defined. The conference will be in person, but a small number of online presentations may be accommodated in extenuating circumstances. Different modes of presentation – whether scholarly papers, workshops, conversations, or research-informed performances (theatre, dance, storytelling, music, art performances, poetry, screenings, etc.) – will structure the conference programme. Proposals shaped by other innovative and creative modes of presenting and sharing ideas are also encouraged.

Please note that all sessions will be 1 hour in length and each presentation will be allowed a maximum of 20 minutes (including questions from the audience). This approach to programming seeks to reduce the number of parallel sessions, so that all participants can attend more sessions, present in front of a larger audience, and enjoy more time and energy to share plenary events and participate in informal, open, and productive exchanges.

A low fees registration will be available for PhD students, Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders, and low-waged or unwaged researchers who are presenting their work

ACIS and Italian at ANU aim to support the travel and accommodation expenses of PhD students, precarious scholars and Indigenous scholars working on Italian Studies at Australian and New Zealand universities and presenting at the conference. This will be subject to funding availability - details will be provided upon acceptance of proposals. Given the limited funds, we encourage scholars to apply for funding from their university in the first instance.

Proposals now due by the 21^st of January 2024 (final deadline) to acis2024@anu.edu.au

Please send proposals for 1-hour sessions or 20 minute individual presentations/performances to acis2024@anu.edu.au by the by the 21^st of January 2024.

Each proposal should be sent as a Word document (.doc, .docx) and include the following

Title(s)
Abstract(s) (max. 200 words)
Affiliation (if applicable)
Bio (max. 100 words)
Personal or institutional website’s url (if applicable)
Email address(es)

Acceptance emails will be sent out by late January 2024, and we expect all presenters to register for the conference by the end of March 2024.

Early bird registration (discounted fees) will be available until the 15th March 2024 (see "Registration" for more details)

Registrations will open in mid to late January 2024. Early bird and discounted fees will be available until the 15th of March 2024.

These will be the available fees options:

• Full conference $550

• Full conference early bird $400

• Full conference discount (students, low income, and Indigenous scholars; early bird only) $125

• 1 day $180

• Conference dinner $110

Keynote speakers (in alphabetical order)

Chiara Beccalossi
Camilla Hawthorne

Chiara Beccalossi is an Associate Professor in history at the University of Lincoln in the UK. After graduating from the University of Bologna, she completed her PhD at Queen Mary University of London before undertaking a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland. On returning to the UK, she held a position at Birkbeck, University of London.

Chiara works on the medicalisation of sexual behaviour and gender identities in a transnational context and has published extensively on the history of sexuality. Her publications include Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920 (Palgrave, 2012) and numerous peer-reviewed articles.

In 2015, Chiara won a five-year Wellcome Trust award to research how hormone treatments were used as eugenic tools in Southern Europe and Latin America. Her forthcoming monograph, Sexology, Hormones and Medical Experiments in the Latin Atlantic World: Local Power and International Networks, 1918-1950, focusses on four medical institutes in Italy, Spain, Argentina and Brazil, and traces their collaboration to explore how hormones were used to control human reproduction and normalise gender and sexual deviances.

Chiara has held several international visiting fellowships at prestigious universities, including Dartmouth (USA) and the University of Sydney, and a visiting professorship at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. In 2018, she organised a touring video art exhibition, ‘Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science’ and public seminar series to raise awareness about trans-related issues, which saw her work with art galleries across Europe, such as Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), and LGBTQ+ organisations in the UK, Italy and Spain.

Camilla Hawthorne (she/they) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Italian Studies Program, the Legal Studies Program, and the Visualizing Abolition Studies Certificate Program at UCSC. Camilla is co-founder of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022; translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero, Astarte Edizioni, 2023). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy; she was also awarded the Leonardo Da Vinci Society Award in Humanities/Social Sciences in 2021 and the Young Investigator Award for Innovation in the Study of Italian Culture in 2022, both from the Italian Scientists & Scholars in North American Foundation.

Camilla received her PhD in Geography and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.

Campus facilities

Useful links below provide details on:

Accommodation

There is a list of partner accommodation providers here offering exclusive discounted rates for ANU guests. These can be accessed via the ANU travel booker CTM or direct with the property.
Some additional local hotels are listed below:

HOTEL	ADDRESS	DISTANCE FROM ANU	WALK TIME
QT Canberra	London Circuit, 2600 Canberra, Australia	1.1 km	14min
Hyatt Park Hotel	120 Commonwealth Avenue, Yarralumla, 2600 Canberra, Australia	4.4km	44 min
Crowne Plaza Canberra	1 Binara Street	1.6km	20min
Midnight Hotel Canberra	1 Elouera Street	1.2km	15min
Ovolo Nishi	25 Edinburgh Avenue	1.3km	16min
Quest Canberra City Walk	240 City Walk	1.5km	18min
Mantra on Northbourne	84 Northbourne Ave, 2612 Canberra, Australia	650m	10min
Mantra on MacArthur	219 Northbourne Avenue Turner ACT, 2601 Canberra, Australia	2km	27min
Novotel	65 Northbourne Avenue, 2600 Canberra, Australia	650m	10min
Pavilion on Northbourne	242 Northbourne Avenue, 2602 Canberra, Australia	2.3km	32min