Conference Report – 2024 SIS PG Colloquium: Memory and Italian Culture
University College Cork, 6 December 2024
Organised by Francesca Nieddu (UCC) and Noreen Kane (UCC) with the support of SIS PG Representatives Dario Galassini (UCC), Silvia Vari (University of Warwick), and Elisa Vivaldi (University of Edinburgh) and generously funded by the SIS.
The 2024 SIS PG Colloquium ‘Memory and Italian Culture’, hosted by University College Cork on 6 December, consisted of nine papers by ten postgraduates from universities in Ireland, Italy, the UK and the US, and two keynote lectures by Dr Silvia Ross (UCC) and Professor Stefania Lucamante (The Catholic University of America and the University of Cagliari). Postgraduate students at various stages – from pre-doctoral to doctoral to recent PhD graduates – had the opportunity to share their work, engage in meaningful discussions with peers, and receive valuable feedback from keynote speakers and senior researchers working on memory.
The colloquium included three panels focusing on national and transnational Italian memory across a range of contexts and media. It commenced with welcoming remarks given by Dr Daragh O’Connell, Head of the Department of Italian at UCC and Director of the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland (CDSI). This was followed by the first panel, “Problematising Postcolonial, Migratory and Marginalised Memory”, chaired by Silvia Vari (University of Warwick), and consisting of three papers. Michele Baldaro (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt) investigated how the figure of the doctor in postwar colonial texts exposes both the italiani brava gente myth and the propensity to exoticise the colonial Other. This was followed by a paper by Elisabetta Visaggio (King’s College London) which explored the travelling oceanic memories of economic migrants from Southern Italy to North and South America (1890-1930) through the lens of Ernesto De Martino’s orizzonte mitico-rituale and Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma. The panel concluded with a paper by Francesca Passasseo (University of Texas at Austin), who blended theoretical and empirical insights arising from her archival research on the Wages for Housework Movement.
The second panel, “From the Second World War to the Present Day: (Re)mediating Memory and Historical Trauma”, chaired by Dr Chiara Giuliani (UCC), began with an online intervention by Irene Ros (University of Edinburgh and University of Strathclyde) titled “Performing the Collective Memory of Stragismo” in which the spectacularisation of violence was juxtaposed with women’s oral histories of the period. This was followed by Matilde Piu’s (University of Pisa) paper on intergenerational trauma in Włodek Goldkorn’s Il bambino nella neve, which focused on the power of the literary imagination as an intervention into trauma in the postmemory generation. The panel concluded with an intervention by Cristian Bergonzo and Giuliana Pala (University of Bologna) who discussed intermediality and multidirectional memory in two narrative essays by Massimo Palma (1978), exploring the relationship between media and memory.
Professor Stefania Lucamante’s keynote talk, “The Natural History of the Dead: from Ernest Hemingway’s WWI Narratives to Contemporary Historiographical Novels. History through the Lens of Nicoletta Verna and Ilaria Rossetti”, posed stimulating reflections on literature as its own epistemic field, emphasising its capacity to construct alternative meanings of the past, offering readers the possibility to actively reimagine what could have happened at critical historic moments. The historiographical novels taken into consideration also emphasise the prominent role of women in the world wars.
The final panel, “Reshaping the Past and the Future through the Urban Environment”, chaired by Elisa Vivaldi (University of Edinburgh), opened with an intervention by Zoe Fox (University of Birmingham) that focused on the political instrumentalisation of images of Roma Sparita from the Risorgimento to Fascism. This was followed by Claudia Sbuttoni’s (University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo) paper on memories of postwar resettlement in Villaggio Giuliano in Rome. Giulia Bernuzzi (UCC) concluded the panel with her intervention on memory and resistance in the futuristic urban landscape of Venice represented in Antonio Scurati’s La seconda mezzanotte.
The theme of memory and the urban environment was further explored in Dr Silvia Ross’ keynote talk, “Re-membering World War II through Ruins: Wounded Bodies, Memory and Regeneration in the Postwar Florence of Aldo Palazzeschi and Michael Ondaatje”, which investigated the expressive possibilities of “wounds” in the urban environment.
In a colloquium in which participants’ papers and keynote lectures dialogued closely with each other, significant themes emerged including the agency of individual memory in relation to dominant memory narratives, the ability of cultural products to engage the reader or viewer in active interpretative processes which can lead to changes in the present and future, and the relationship between the urban environment and both dominant and resistant memories.
The colloquium provided the opportunity for ample conversations in formal and informal contexts on memory and Italian culture. Meaningful connections were forged and participants were invited to submit an article to a 2025 special issue of Notes in Italian Studies, “Memory and Italian Culture”.
We thank the SIS, the SIS PG representatives, the staff, PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the Italian Department at UCC, all of the participants, and the two keynote speakers for making the 2024 SIS PG Colloquium such a success and for providing a forum to develop the intersections of Memory Studies and Italian Studies.