Si segnala il bando di ammissione al 34° del dottorato Inter-ateneo Università di Trieste-Università di Udine, “Storia delle Società, delle Istituzioni e del Pensiero. Dal Medioevo all’Età Contemporanea” in scadenza il 14 giugno 2018.

Premio Agostino Lombardo  

Per commemorare la figura del grande studioso scomparso, l’AISNA (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani) bandisce il Premio Agostino Lombardo, assegnato alla migliore tesi di laurea di argomento americanistico discussa nel corso dell’anno precedente in un’università italiana.

Il premio consiste in € 500,00 (cinquecento). Al premio in denaro si aggiungono, come da regolamento, l’iscrizione all’AISNA per un anno senza ulteriori presentazioni da parte di membri dell’Associazione e la proposta di pubblicazione di un estratto della tesi sulla rivista RSA.

Possono concorrere al Premio tutte le tesi di Laurea Specialistica o Magistrale discusse nel corso dell’anno solare 2017 su argomenti inerenti lo studio della letteratura, della storia e della cultura nord-americana. Ciascun membro dell’Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani, in regola con il pagamento delle quote associative, potrà proporre non più di una tesi, che dovrà essere accompagnata da una circostanziata relazione a firma del/della proponente. Il/la proponente non deve essere necessariamente stato/a relatore/relatrice della tesi.

La tesi dovrà essere inviata in formato cartaceo ed elettronico. La tesi in formato cartaceo e in unica copia, stampata fronte-retro e rilegata con semplice cartoncino e spirale, va inviata a: Premio Agostino Lombardo, c/o Centro Studi Americani, via Michelangelo Caetani, 32, 00186 Roma. La tesi in formato elettronico (pdf), va inviata invece all’indirizzo della Segretaria AISNA: segretario-aisna@unive.it. Il/la proponente dovrà inviare la propria relazione in formato elettronico al medesimo indirizzo della Segretaria. Tutta la documentazione dovrà essere inoltrata entro il 1 giugno 2018. I lavori relativi al precedente bando 2017, non pervenuti alla commissione a causa di comprovati disguidi di trasmissione/ricezione postale (cartacea e/o elettronica), saranno riammessi a concorrere per il 2018.

Le tesi pervenute saranno esaminate da una Commissione che, dopo aver valutato individualmente gli elaborati, stilerà una graduatoria di merito, designerà il/la vincitore/vincitrice e delibererà l’eventuale assegnazione di menzioni di merito. Il vincitore/la vincitrice del Premio verrà proclamato/a nel corso della Assemblea dell’Associazione che si terrà a Roma il 27 settembre 2018.

Premio Caterina Gullì

La famiglia Gullì ha istituito a partire dall’anno 2006 un premio per onorare la figura di Caterina Gullì, americanista prematuramente scomparsa nell’anno 1990, quando era in procinto di terminare la sua tesi di dottorato in Studi Americani presso l’Università degli Studi di Roma 3, nonché un Ph.D. in Letterature Comparate presso la Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ).

Il premio consiste in € 300 (trecento). Al premio in denaro si aggiungono, come da regolamento, una quota di iscrizione all’AISNA per un anno, senza ulteriori presentazioni da parte di membri dell’Associazione, e la proposta di pubblicazione di un estratto della tesi sulla rivista RSA.

Nell’istituire il premio, la famiglia Gullì delega l’Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani a scegliere ogni anno, fra le tesi presentate al Premio Agostino Lombardo, una tesi dotata di particolari caratteristiche di innovatività e originalità alla quale assegnare il premio. Tutte le tesi presentate al Premio Agostino Lombardo, pertanto, parteciperanno automaticamente anche al Premio Caterina Gullì.

L’AISNA si riserva di contribuire alle spese di viaggio dei vincitori di entrambi i premi per la sede prevista dell’Assemblea annuale.

RSA Journal, the official journal of the Italian Association for North American Studies (AISNA), invites submissions for its 2018 issue on “Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Between Social Activism, Academic Discourse, and Cultural Representation.” 
 

Barack Obama’s first election was hailed by many as signaling the advent of post-racial United States. By the end of his second term, however, the issue of race had come back with a vengeance at the center of both public debate and social interaction. The election of Donald J. Trump amid his open flirtations with alt-right groups and the KKK marked a backlash against the symbolic import of Obama’s presidency, and further proved how social injustice, color-based discrimination, and violence still powerfully shape black life in the U.S.

Despite Obama’s call during the first campaign for “a more perfect union” to heal the wounds caused by racism to the nation, his presidency worked as a catalyst for racial tensions, with vociferous sections of white America questioning his legitimacy both as an American and as a representative of the nation, doubting his wife’s and his own loyalty to the country, and leveling charges of bias and incompetence against his acts. These attacks against the commander-in-chief, as unprecedented as openly racist, disproved the earlier celebrations of American postraciality, and highlighted how far race is from being an obsolete category to be dismissed as genetically inconsistent and visually flimsy. Indeed race has lately (re)emerged as a powerful and crucial tool of inquiry in a number of critical approaches which investigate our present as the “afterlife of slavery” (Saidiya Hartman) and claim the historical and ontological specificity of anti-blackness as a matrix of all forms of racism. While images of black, mostly young citizens killed at the hands of policemen and vigilantes inundate the social media on a daily basis, showing that black bodies are as vulnerable today as they were under plantation slavery, the progressive, redemptive narrative of American racial history that seemed legitimated by the election of a black president has been exposed as at best untenable. The daily spectacle of the expendability of black bodies has led to a new political visibility of the black community in the urban space.

Among the most powerful responses to this new cultural climate is the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a grassroots effort fostered by the use of social media that ambitiously brings together community organizing strategies, justice reform campaigns, academia-informed discourses on gender and race, and aims at spreading its impact well beyond the geopolitical borders of the U.S., understanding both blackness and social injustice as transnational phenomena to be fought in solidarity among people of color. In the four years since its founding, the movement has called attention to the alarming number of black victims of police brutality as the result not merely of racial profiling, but of the unwritten, often unacknowledged, but still powerfully operating rules of systemic white privilege, and made the latter the ultimate target of its campaigns and wider action. Marked by horizontal, group-based forms of leadership that foreground the voices of long-marginalized identities (women and queers of color especially), the #BlackLivesMatter has predictably triggered controversial responses, from being awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2017 to being listed as “Black identity extremists” by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division in the same year, quickly becoming a major actor in the current debate about race (and gender) within and outside the American academia and politics.   

The present issue of RSA seeks contributions that explore the movement, its complexity and fluidity, from different perspectives and across a range of disciplines. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• BLM and antiblackness/Afro-pessimism
• BLM and global Black activism
• BLM and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement
• BLM and the media
• BLM and/in pop culture
• The visuality of BLM activism
• BLM and African American literature
• Fiction, poetry, music addressing the BLM movement
• BLM and gender theory

Submissions and a short cv should be sent by April 30, 2018 to the editors, Gianna Fusco (mariagiovanna.fusco@univaq.it) and Anna Scacchi (ascacchi@alfanet.it). Acceptance will be emailed by May 15, 2018.  The CFP can also be downloaded here. 

In vista dell’entrata in vigore del nuovo percorso di abilitazione all’insegnamento (FIT) e dell’annuncio da parte degli atenei di iniziative volte al recupero dei 24 CFU richiesti, richiamiamo l’attenzione dei soci sulla spendibilità in questo senso dei crediti nel settore L-LIN/11 incluso fra i SSD validi per il conseguimento dei crediti di didattica disciplinare.

A tal fine rinviamo i soci alla pagina MIUR del decreto 59/2017 e relativi allegati. In particolare, l’allegato al DM del 10.8.2017, n. 616, pagina 20.

AISNA ha il piacere di annunciare, di seguito, i vincitori per l’anno 2017 dei Premi Lombardo e Gullì, e delle borse di studio istituite grazie ai fondi dell’Ambasciata degli Stati Uniti in Italia.

Per ricordare Cinzia Biagiotti, docente di Lingua e Letterature Angloamericane all’Universita di Pisa, si bandisce la seconda edizione del premio di traduzione riservato a tesi di laurea magistrate, suddiviso in due sezioni:

1) Tesi di laurea in traduzione letteraria da opera di scrittore statunitense.
2) Tesi di laurea in traduzione letteraria o saggistica da opera in lingua inglese di viaggiatori in Toscana.

Le tesi, discusse negli anni solari 2016 e 2017, devono essere inviate in duplice copia a “Premio di Traduzione Cinzia Biagiotti“, c/o Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica —Palazzo Scala — via S. Maria, 67, 56126 Pisa, entro il 28 febbraio 2018 (farà fede il timbro postale).

Le tesi pervenute saranno esaminate da una Commissione formata da:
Dacia Maraini — Presidente
Marina Camboni
Roberta Ferrari
Barbara Lanati
Gaia Marsico

Segreteria Premio: Laura Coltelli (lcoltelli21@gmail.com)

Data limite: 1 settembre 2017

La rivista América Crítica, in occasione della pubblicazione del secondo numero (dicembre 2017), invita alla presentazione di articoli per una sezione monografica curata da Javier González Díez (Università di Torino) e Fiorenzo Iuliano (Università di Cagliari).

Questa sezione propone una riflessione sulle visioni dello spazio urbano e della vita cittadina nel contesto pan-americano, con particolare attenzione ai linguaggi e alle pratiche sociali che assume –  o ha assunto in passato – l’idea di “fare la città” a partire dalle dinamiche della subalternità e dalle rappresentazioni contro-egemoniche dal “basso”. Saranno pubblicati in questa sezione articoli che riflettono, quindi, sulle attività di riappropriazione della città, sulle strategie di resistenza alle pratiche di gentrification, sull’interazione tra spazio urbano e gruppi subalterni (minoritari e/o “sottoculturali”) e sulle modalità in cui lo spazio urbano è stato, di volta in volta, rappresentato, immaginato o reinventato attraverso diversi mezzi espressivi (letteratura, teatro, cinema, fumetto, musica, fotografia, televisione, arti visive). Sono infine auspicabili interventi che offrano una riflessione sulle riconfigurazioni degli spazi urbani in una prospettiva comparata tra Nord e Sud America.

Saranno benvenuti articoli inediti e di carattere interdisciplinare, dalle scienze sociali agli studi umanistici.

La sezione monografica includerà le seguenti linee tematiche:

Rappresentazioni controegemoniche della città

Linguaggi e forme della socialità urbana

(Ri)creazioni di identità urbane

Appropriazioni/riappropriazioni dello spazio urbano

Culture indigene e spazi urbani

Riflessione sulla dicotomia rurale/urbano

Città del sud Vs città del nord

Impatto dei flussi migratori nazionali e transazionali

Resistenza alle pratiche egemoniche di definizione degli spazi urbani

Le studiose e gli studiosi che desiderino partecipare possono inviare i loro contributi entro il 1 settembre 2017, alla pagina web della rivista, nella sezione ‘proposte online’ (http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions), nella quale si possono consultare le Norme editoriali (http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap/about/submissions#authorGuidelines).

América Critica Website: http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap/index

The newly elected administration inaugurated the year 2017 by raising questions in the nation and the world about the oncoming policies of the US government regarding the construction or removal of barriers, the care or exploitation of the environment, and many other dilemmas involving radically alternative scenarios for our future relations to the world and to our habitats. What is at stake is the option of facing contemporary cultural and political challenges on the ground of a shared or an exclusive governance.

In terms of historical and literary reflection, this involves a rethinking of the positioning of even the newest transnational perspectives, such as Border, Hemispherical, and Oceanic Studies, which are called to acknowledge the mobility and multiplicity of the where and what of their investigation. The 24th AISNA Biennial Conference proposes to discuss possible ways of reconceptualizing the mutual and shifting positions of center(s) and margin(s), subject(s) and object(s) in terms of relation, and particularly of an inclusive structure of relations that are based on an ecological ethics. Workshop proposals are invited from the diverse areas of inquiry of AISNA addressing methodological hypotheses, such as the need to assume a complex framework of simultaneous scales of analysis; translation as the main means and medium to expand our theoretical conversation; an ecocentric and ecological paradigm as the ground for our decision-making procedures; and networking as the privileged tool for a hopeful and successful management of the urgent issues posed by an unstoppable process of globalization and an apparently similarly unavoidable process of exhaustion of the planet’s resources.

Topics may include but are not confined to:

• North-American Studies & World Literature
• Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in a Global Perspective
• Exilic Writing
• Migration and the Environment
• US Literature and Global Circulation (Markets and Publishers)
 Translation and World Literature; Multilingualism; New Textualities
• Ecolanguage, Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics • Animal Studies
• Environmental Dystopias
• Landscape Transformations and Shifting Geographies
• Environmental Justice
• Environmental Politics; Presidencies and Environmental Policies
• Foreign Relations and Climate Change
• US Environmental Activism
• Inhabiting the ‘Wilderness’ – Past and Present
• Natives’ Territories and Newcomers’ Settlements
• Ecofeminism

The deadline for workshop proposals is April 15, 2017. Submitted proposals will be reviewed by the conference organizer and the AISNA board. A selection of max. 20 workshops will be issued by April 30, notified to the submitters by email, and published on the Conference website.

Submissions should be written in English and include:
• a workshop title • a clearly stated description of the proposed topic in no more than 300 words
• contact details of the workshop’s coordinator or coordinators (max. 2), including professional affiliation.

Each workshop will host no more than four papers, including the coordinator’s or coordinators’. In case they intend to present papers in their own workshops, aspiring coordinators should indicate their prospective titles in their proposals. We remind aspiring coordinators that their task will comprise a brief introduction of the speakers, a strict monitoring of the observance of the allotted 20-minute time for each presentation, and a supervision of the following question and answer session, aimed to stimulate a fruitful discussion in the last but essential part of each workshop. For this purpose, in their proposal they should also suggest the name of a discussant.

All workshop proposals should be sent by e-mail to the conference organizer, Paola Loreto (paola.loreto@unimi.it), as well as to the secretary of AISNA, Simone Francescato (segretario-aisna@unive.it).

Link to the conference page: sites.unimi.it/AISNA

Link to the registration page: sites.unimi.it/AISNA/register

>> NEW <<: Here is the Conference program.

Bando per borse di studio per la partecipazione alla AISNA Biennial Conference di Milano

21st International Colloquium of American Studies
(Biannual Conference of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies):

The conference is organized by Palacký University Olomouc in cooperation with The Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies, and Embassy of the United States in Prague.

TOPICS AND ISSUES:

• How does literature, film, television, art, history and cultural geography reflect the notion of the human body/subject/identity or objects as being situated or emplaced; place as an event?
• How does literature respond to Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of place as a field of care?
• Does the identification of place have to involve an “us/them distinction in which the other is devalued” (David Harvey)?
• Should one speak of constructing or producing a place? (“Place, then, needs to be understood as an embodied relationship with the world. Places are constructed by people doing things and in this sense are never ‘finished’ but constantly being performed.” (Nigel Thrift)
• How are places “produced” by cultural practices such as literature, film and music?
• How is the human subject and identity constructed or produced by places?
• Which new kinds of places appear in recent American literature?
• Place as home, outdoor places, indoor places and their changing meanings over time.

Deadline for paper proposals (ca 250 words): March 30
Address: colloquium.olomouc@upol.cz and michal.peprnik@upol.cz
Extended versions of papers will be peer-reviewed and their selection will be published in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Moravian Journal of Literature and Film published by Palacký University Olomouc Press (seehttp://www.moravianjournal.upol.cz/ ).
Plenary speakers TBA. See the colloquium web pages for further details:  http://colloquium.upol.cz
 
Registration fee: 1000 CZK (40 EUR), reduced fee for doctoral students: 800 CZK (30 EUR). The fee includes conference package, two lunches, and a reception.

The geography of noir has frequently changed after its “classical” period  (1941 The Maltese Falcon – 1958 Touch of Evil), both coming to include  crime literature, TV series, social drama, and new media in its sphere, and welcoming such controversial issues as gender, ethnicity, and trauma among its themes. We invite scholars in all fields of Angloamerican studies to send proposals about noir as genre, sub- (or sur-) genre, or stylistic mode; about noir writers and film directors of the past and the present; about the new directions of crime fiction(s) regarding LGBT; about the ways noir has (or has not) interfaced with chaos theory, complexity, and fractal geometry; about the connections between noir and politics; about the representation(s) of evil in contemporary literature and the media; and about noir and the American Canon.

Authors are kindly requested to register in the journal site and to follow all the instructions in the “Authors’ guide” when uploading their papers. As usual, submissions (about 5000-6000 words) will be double-blind peer-reviewed.
The deadline for their submission is 15 July 2017