[Commlist] CFP: Italian Quarterly - Special Issue | "Inscribing Voice: Recording and Notation in Twentieth-Century Italy"

Call for Papers

"Inscribing Voice: Recording and Notation in Twentieth-Century Italy"
Italian Quarterly - Special Issue

Editors: Isabella Livorni & Milan Reynolds

This special issue offers a new perspective on twentieth-century Italian 
studies by examining the historical and material relationships between 
voice, recording technologies, and notation practices. While media 
studies has enriched our understanding of visual culture, less work has 
delved into the dynamic expressions of auditory culture in Italy. We aim 
to connect recent scholarly work on voice in musicology and Italian 
studies with sound studies’ emphasis on histories of recording 
technologies, exploring the distinctly modern relationship between the 
voice and technologies such as the phonograph, magnetic tape, and 
digital recording. At the same time, we see an opportunity for 
interdisciplinary theorizations of notation that link literary 
experiments with form to musical questions of representation. Notation 
defines the porous boundaries between writing and sound, as well as the 
hybrid practices of poets, composers, ethnomusicologists, and others who 
operate across changing media and fields.

We seek contributions that expand the historical and material 
understanding of voice in Italian studies, as it has been shaped by 
recording technologies and notation methods. Through comparative 
listenings across literature, music, communication, media, and 
anthropology, we aim to bring a modern perspective to ongoing 
discussions of voice in Italian studies.

Potential topics include:

- Sound and typographic experimentation in literature and literary journals
- Experimental and electronic music’s use of the voice and technology
- Notation of dialect, orality/aurality, and folk music in Italian 
ethnographic research
- Italian poetry’s relationship with the voice and recording
- Racialized, gendered, or othered voices and their inscription
- More-than-human voices and hierarchies of listening
- Recording and circulation of Italian popular music and protest song
- Political speech and its connection to inscription and surveillance
- Vocality in Italian film and the history of dubbing

Please submit a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words by 
November 30, 2025. In addition, please include a short bio of 300 words 
or fewer, with your name and affiliation. Publication of accepted 
articles is projected for early 2027. No payment from the authors will 
be required.

Please send abstracts and queries to: (milan.reynolds /at/ rutgers.edu) 
<mailto:(milan.reynolds /at/ rutgers.edu)>
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