[Commlist] cfp: Exploring the Landscape of Cinema and Media Studies in Italy Past and Present, Approaches and Issues

https://aur.edu/events/fifth-edition-journal-italian-cinema-media-studies-international-conference

Call for Papers
Exploring the Landscape of Cinema and Media Studies in Italy Past and 
Present, Approaches and Issues
Fifth Edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 
International Conference

In Person ONLY
The American University of Rome
11-13 June 2026

Keynote Speaker
Giorgio Bertellini
University of Michigan (United States)

'A Crucible of Sorrow’: The Disregarded Question of Italian American Cinema

For over a century, Hollywood has portrayed Italian American characters 
not only as inclined not just to perform violent acts, as mainstream 
criticism has always noted, but also to endure them. Against the notion 
that immigrants are a problem in need of a solution, in this talk I 
examine how and why Italian Americans' media representation has 
variously addressed one of Hollywood's more troubling needs — that of 
showcasing experiences of pain, anguish and defeat.

Giorgio Bertellini is Professor in the Department of Film, Television 
and Media at the University of Michigan and member of the Advisory Board 
of JICMS. He is the author and editor of the award-winning volumes Italy 
in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Indiana 
University Press, 2010), Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader (John 
Libbey/Indiana University Press, 2013), and The Divo and the Duce: 
Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America 
(University of California Press, 2019; Italian trans. Le Monnier, 2022). 
His other books include a monograph on Sarajevo-born film director Emir 
Kusturica, published in Italian, English, Romanian and Persian.

FILM SCREENINGS

Il mestiere di vivere / The Stressful Art of Living (2024)
Directed by Giovanna Gagliardo
Giovanna Gagliardo started as a journalist for Il Giorno, Il Messaggero, 
la Repubblica and Espresso and worked as a screenplay writer for RAI 
television series. In the 1970s, she worked in cinema as a screenwriter 
for Alberto Lattuada and Miklós Jancsó. Her debut film Maternale (1978), 
was a psychological and symbolic representation of the relationship 
between mothers and daughters. She then produced Bellissime: Parte prima 
(2004) and Parte seconda (2006), a documentary consisting of archival 
footage that depicts the evolving conditions of Italian women during the 
twentieth century. In 2009, Gagliardo directed L’abito di domani. Storia 
della moda nel tempo, a documentary about the sociocultural and economic 
history of Italy through fashion. A poignant documentary, Vittime – ‘Gli 
anni di piombo’, revisits the lead years through the stories of the 
survivors and the victims’s families. In 2012, Gagliardo directed Venti 
anni, a docu-fiction starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and 
ending with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Then, in 2016, she produced 
the documentary Le Romane. Storie di donne e di quartieri, in which she 
pairs four female characters with four neighbourhoods in Rome. Two 
documentaries set in the Mediterranean are: Il mare della nostra storia 
(2018) about the history of Italian colonialism in Libya from the 
perspective of the Italian and the Italian-speaking Jewish communities 
in Tripoli; and Good Morning Tel Aviv (2021) covering history, life and 
culture in the titular capital city. Her most recent film Il mestiere di 
vivere portrays Cesare Pavese through his work as poet, prose writer, 
translator, editor and screenwriter.

Finale allegro (2025)
Written and directed by Emanuela Piovano
Emanuela Piovano is an author, director, producer and distributor. She 
worked for several years for Paolo Gobetti’s Archivio Nazionale 
Cinematografico della Resistenza, Rai and the film journal Il nuovo 
spettatore. Piovano started her career as the producer of Processo a 
Caterina Ross (1982) by Gabriella Rosaleva. In 1988 she founded her own 
production company KitchenFilm to promote international independent 
cinema by young and women filmmakers. Together with Anna Gasco and 
Tiziana Pellerano, she also directed the documentary Le rose blu (1989) 
about the fire that destroyed the Le Vallette women’s prison in Turin 
and killed eleven inmates on 3 June 1989. Her feature debut, Le complici 
(1998), was the adaptation of Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s novel Complice il 
dubbio (1992). This was followed by the romantic drama Amourfù (2003), 
the drama Le stelle inquiete (2010) on Simone Weil and Gustave Thibon, 
L’età d’oro (2016) an homage to filmmaker Annabella Miscuglio, and the 
docu-film Con voce di Nilde (2023) on Nilde Iotti, one of the founding 
mothers of the Italian Constitution and President of the Chamber of 
Deputies.




Closing Keynote Speaker

Frank Burke
Queen’s University (Canada)
Reflections on the 2026 JICMS Conference with 50 Years of Hindsight

Frank Burke is Professor Emeritus from Queen’s University. He has 
published five books on Fellini, including A Companion to Federico 
Fellini with Marguerite Waller and Marita Gubareva (Wiley, 2020), and 
Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern (Intellect, 
Chicago UP, 2020). He has provided the audio commentary for the 
Criterion releases of Il Bidone, Roma, and Amarcord. He has co-edited 
with Amy Hough-Dugdale and Marita Gubareva a collection of essays on 
Tonino Guerra in the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media (2023). He has 
also published on numerous Italian directors other than Fellini, various 
American directors, horror cinema, experimental cinema, the peplum and 
Canadian cinema.
Organizing Committee

Flavia Laviosa, Wellesley College, United States
Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, The American University of Rome, Italy
Conference Committee

Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan, United States
Milly Buonanno, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Frank Burke, Queen’s University, Canada
Jim Carter, Boston University, United States
Stephen Gundle, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Bernadette Luciano, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Paola Panarese, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy





This conference will be centred on the relationship between Italian film 
and media studies and the disciplines of the arts and humanities and the 
social sciences. We welcome contributions that position Italian media 
products and practices of past and present in relation to the 
methodologies and/or thematic concerns of disciplines including (but not 
limited to): History, Geography, History of Art, Theatre Studies, 
Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Gender 
Studies, Political Science, Psychology, Business Studies, Economics and 
Criminology. Also welcome are contributions which locate Italian media 
products and practices in relation to sub-areas of Film and Media 
Studies, such as Production Studies, Star and Celebrity Studies and 
Adaptation Studies.

The aim of the conference is twofold: first, to consider how an 
awareness of and engagement with Italian media products can enrich 
debates across the humanities and social sciences; and second, to 
explore ways in which different forms of cross-disciplinary dialogue 
might enliven Italian media studies and introduce new methods and themes.

The conference includes the following themes:
Narratives of time: Italian cinema and media between nostalgia and 
anticipation. Rethinking time in Italian media, with a focus on how 
contemporary Italian cinema and media address temporality—from the 
return of retro aesthetics and the proliferation of nostalgic narratives 
to speculative and anticipatory forms. This theme may include studies of 
remakes, memorial reworkings and new visual genealogies of the past and 
future.
Artificial intelligence, computational aesthetics and Italian cultural 
production. Analysing how the use of intelligent technologies 
(generative AI, deepfakes, speech synthesis, machine learning) is 
transforming the creation, distribution and enjoyment of Italian cinema 
and media. Areas of inquiry can also include algorithmic inequalities, 
data biases and emerging forms of posthuman authorship.
Rebranding the nation: imaginaries of Italy between cinema, media and 
cultural marketing. Investigating how cinema interacts with the cultural 
industry and media communication to narrate and promote Italy as a 
cultural brand today: through festivals, the enhancement of audiovisual 
heritage, ‘export-oriented’ seriality, editorial and museum operations, 
institutional campaigns.
The media professions: the hidden infrastructure of Italian cultural 
production. Exploring the labour and professional roles underpinning 
Italian cinema and media outside authorship. Areas of research may 
include editing, costume design, sound technique, dubbing, translation, 
distribution, cultural mediation or festival curatorship. An opportunity 
to rethink cultural work and the construction of the Italian media 
industry from lateral and interdisciplinary perspectives.
The media professions/media constraints: how budgetary constraints 
impact (for better or worse) cultural production. This could address 
alternative creative methods such as radically changed scripts, 
animation or AI.

The conference will host presentations of recently published/forthcoming 
books, edited volumes or academic works in progress, so we invite 
authors and editors to contribute in ‘Meet the Author’ roundtables.

With this CFP, the conference organizers invite proposals from scholars, 
independent researchers, cinema and media professionals and graduate 
students for single papers, pre-constituted panels and roundtables.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

    Feminist re-writings of media history: women’s authorship in 
Italian film and television
    The emerging field of location studies: reconfiguring spatial 
identity in contemporary Italian media production
    How co-productions are increasingly changing the geographical 
landscapes of Italian cinema
    Rebranding the nation: how the Netflix aesthetic is visually 
impacting Italian cinema and television
    Production dynamics in Italian cinema: ranging from a director's 
on-set style (collaborative, hierarchical) to the roles of creatives or 
technical crews, to the influence of technology
    Digital cinema
    Web seriality
    (Auto)biographical cinema
    Crime cinema and television
    Representations of violence against women in cinema and TV: 
victims, witnesses and perpetrators
    Representing honour crimes in cinema and media
    Ageism and gender exclusion in the Italian film industry, both on 
and off screen
    Representations of ecology and climate change in Italian film and media
    LGBTQ+ authorship and representation in Italian film and television
    How censorship and regulation shape filmmaking practices



The conference will include the screening of 2-3 films with filmmakers 
in attendance.

The languages of the conference are English, Italian and Spanish. 
Proposals for virtual papers will not be considered.

Please send an abstract of 250 words for single papers, or 250 words per 
contribution for pre-constituted panels (3 speakers max) or roundtables, 
plus a short bio of 100 words (stating academic title and affiliation, 
research interests and major publications [publisher/year], not titles 
of articles or chapters). Please submit in a word.doc format, not pdf. 
We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations (inclusive of film clips).

Abstracts for consideration should be submitted to Flavia Laviosa at 
(flaviosa /at/ wellesley.edu).

The deadline to submit abstracts is 19 December 2025. Notification of 
acceptance will be sent out to authors by 16 January 2026.





Conference registration fee includes: coffee every morning, 3 buffet 
lunches, and closing reception.

€200 regular rate (professors and post-doc)
€150 student rate





The deadline for inclusion in the conference program is 15 March 2026. 
Please, make every effort to pay conference fees before this date.
In case of withdrawals from the conference, the registration fee will 
not be reimbursed.
In case of cancellation of the conference, the registration fee will be 
reimbursed.


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