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@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.