CFP: “Italy, the World, and the Eternal City”

California Italian Studies is seeking submissions for its thematic Issue 1 of Volume 13, entitled “Italy, the World, and the Eternal City: Rome in History, Memory, and Imagination”, to be published in 2024.*

Issue Editors: Bradford Bouley (UCSB) and Richard Wittman (UCSB).

The next volume of CIS seeks to explore the essential relationship between the city of Rome and the wider context of Italy and the world. How has the idea of Rome shaped the concept of Italy and what it means to be Italian? How have the meanings and symbolism of Rome evolved? How have they been used, abused, debated, and contested? As the Eternal City, Caput Mundi, and ombelico del mondo, how has Rome, across the ages, functioned as an international capital and point of exchange between cultures? We invite submissions treating any time period to explore these and other issues relating to Rome’s relationship with Italy and the world beyond.

Please send preliminary contribution proposals (300-400 words) and a brief autobiographical note about yourself by March 31, 2023, to Bradford Bouley (bouley@ucsb.edu) and Richard Wittman (rwittman@ucsb.edu). If your proposal is accepted, you will be expected to submit your essay for peer-reviewing by September 15 through the portal of our journal. Articles can also be submitted without preliminary proposals up until the deadline (September 15), but they are not guaranteed peer reviewing.

All submissions, whether in English or Italian, must follow our submission and formatting guidelines. Failure to meet both will result in the article being sent back to the author for correction at the risk of not meeting the deadline for acceptance.

Unless encouraged otherwise, submissions should not exceed 30 pages of double-spaced text or 10,000 words.

Submissions should fulfil at least one of the journal’s criteria for selection:

1. a) an interdisciplinary scholarly study that combines the practices of multiple disciplines, making significant use of the tools of one discipline in the service of another, or that studies a cluster of scholarly works representing the approaches of various disciplines to a single topic.
2. b) a comparative work that relates the history, culture, society, artistic products or languages of the Italian peninsula, islands and diasporas to other geographical, cultural and linguistic formations.
3. c) a critical work that, in studying a given object, engages in theoretical or methodological reflection on its own approach and its implications within larger disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts.

*Non-thematic submissions to our journal are accepted on a rolling basis and, if accepted, will be published in the order in which they have been accepted and as space becomes available in our volumes.