Spring 2003 Events

Conference: Italian Feminisms: Literature, Theory, Visual Arts 
April 25-26, 2003
Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street, Madison, WI

PROGRAM | PRESENTERS | SPONSORS & CONFERENCE INFORMATION

Friday, April 25

2:15 - 2:30 p.m. Welcoming Remarks

Jane Tylus, Associate Dean of Letter & Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Laird Boswell, Director of the Center for European Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Keith Busby, Chair, French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Grazia Menechella, Conference Organizer, French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2:30 - 4:30 p.m. Session I: “Patriarchy/Anti-Patriarchy”

Moderator: Patrick Rumble (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Victoria De Grazia (Columbia University), “Fascist Patriarchy: Italy under Mussolini”

Marguerite Waller (University of California, Riverside), “Phases of Nichetti’s Luna e l’altra”

Grazia Menechella (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Women, Modernity, and the Dangers of the ventre nevrosico since Mantegazza”

4:30 - 4:45 p.m. Coffee Break

4:45 - 5:30 p.m. Session II: “Maria Rosa Cutrufelli: The Experience of a Feminist  Writer”

Moderator: Ksenija Bilbija (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Interpreter: Stefania Lucamante (Washington Catholic University)

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (Rome, Italy): “Scrivere con l’inchiostro bianco”/ “Writing with White Ink”

Moderator: Gail Geiger (University of Wisconsin- Madison)

Deanna Shemek (University of California, Santa Cruz), “La marchesa, che uomo! Power and Gender in the Letters of Isabella d’Este”

Karen-edis Barzman (SUNY-Binghamton), “Feminisms and Histories of Italian Renaissance Art”

Jane Tylus (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Women’s Renaissances? Burkhardt and Baron Revisited”

Moderator: Giovanna Miceli-Jeffries (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Anna Botta (Smith College), “Women and Gender Relations in Europe”

Stefania Lucamante (Washington Catholic University), “The Prison-House of Marriage: Simone de Beauvoir and Elena Ferrante Discuss Abandonment”

Moderator: Soraya Tlatli (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Robin Pickering-Iazzi (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), “Rita Atria: Testimonial Discourse and Anti-mafia Culture al femminile”

Teresa de Lauretis (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Prodigal Daughters”

General Information: The conference is sponsored by the Department of
French and Italian, and co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies,
the English Department, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the
Women’s Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the
Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago.

With the generous support of the Anonymous Funds and the Center for
European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Italian
Cultural Institute in Chicago. 

The conference is free and open to the public.

Papers and discussion will be in English.

For more information please contact:
Professor Grazia Menechella
Department of French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
618 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Tel: 608.265.8274 / 608.262.5074
Fax: 608.265.3892 
Email: gmeneche@facstaff.wisc.edu 

Anna Botta is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Language and Literature at Smith College. Her areas of research are contemporary Western literary theories, modern and postmodern literatures. She has co-edited two books: Calvino newyorchese (Avagliano, 2002) and Scrittrici eccentriche del Novecento (Le Tre Lune, 2003). Se has written on authors such as Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Antonio Tabucchi,  Cristina Campo, Franca Rame, Julia Kristeva, Jarmila O_kayová, and the Ou.Li.Po.  group.  She is presently researching the intersections between the nomadic subject hailed by European postmodern philosophers and the historic reality of the recent waves of immigration which have moved into the so called “borderless” space of the European Union. to top of page

Karen-Edis Barzman is an Associate Professor of Art History at SUNY-Binghamton. Professor Barzman is also the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art History. She is the author of a recent study on The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and she is the author of one of the two essays in the volume From Studio to Studiolo: Florentine Draftsmanship under the First Medici Grand Dukes (University of Washington Press, 1999). to top of page

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli is a writer and literary critic. She lives in Rome, Italy. She has published various novels: La briganta (1990), Complice il dubbio (1992), Canto al deserto (1994), Il paese dei figli perduti (1999). She has also published travelogues and collections of essays and pamphlets: L’invenzione della donna (1974), Disoccupata con onore (1975), Donna perché piangi (1976), Operaie senza fabbrica (1977), Il denaro in corpo (1996),  Mama Africa (1989) (tr. Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, Zed Books, 1983) .  She has also edited Nella città proibita (1997) (tr. In the Forbidden City, University of Chicago Press, 2000), a collection of erotic stories by contemporary Italian women writers. She founded and continues to direct the literary journal Tuttestorie. Her most recent book, Giorni d’acqua corrente (2002), narrates the author’s encounters with women in six different journeys from Colombia to the Sahara. to top of page

Victoria de Grazia is Professor of History at Columbia University. The focus of her research is mass- and consumer-culture, gender, and the history of family politics. Her research on women in fascist Italy has been very influential in Italian studies, history, sociology, and women’s studies. She is the author of The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945 (University of California Press, 1992). She has co-edited (with E. Furlough) The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (University of California Press, 1996), and (with Sergio Luzzato) Dizionario del fascismo (Einaudi, 2002). to top of page

Teresa de Lauretis is Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a prominent scholar of film and feminist theories, literature, semiotics and psychoanalysis in Italy and in the United States. She is the author of many books and articles, and writes in both English and Italian. Among her books: Soggetti eccentrici (Feltrinelli, 1999); Sui generis. Scritti di teoria femminista (Feltrinelli, 1996); The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Indiana University Press, 1994); Differenza e indifferenza sessuale (Estro, 1989); Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Indiana University Press, 1987); Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1984). to top of page

Stefania Lucamante is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Italian Program at the Catholic University of America. She is the author of Elsa Morante e l'eredità proustiana (Cadmo, 1998)  Isabella Santacroce, (Cadmo, 2002) and the editor of Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001). to top of page

Robin Pickering-Iazzi is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research has focused on gender studies in 20^th century literature and film. She has translated Italian women writers from Italian into English, and she has published Unspeakable Women:  Selected Short Stories Written by Italian Women During Fascism (The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1993). She is the editor of Mothers of Invention: Women, Fascism, and Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and she is the author of Politics of the Visible: Writing Women, Culture, and Fascism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). to top of page

Deanna Shemek is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz.  Professor Shemek is the author of Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Duke University Press, 1998), as well as numerous articles on Italian literature and culture.  She is currently at work on a study of the letters of Isabella d'Este (1474-1539), and she is also producing an edition of Isabella's selected letters in translation for University of Chicago Press. to top of page

Jane Tylus is a Professor of Italian and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the UW- Madison. Her publications include Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford University Press, 1993), a translation of the sacred poetry of Lucrezia Tornabuoni (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and the forthcoming Longman's Anthology of World Literature, for which she edited the volume on early modern Europe. to top of page

Marguerite R. Waller is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UC Riverside, where she also teaches in the Film and Visual Culture Program. She is the author of Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), and she has co-edited (with Jennifer Rycenga) Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance (Routledge, 2000) and co-edited (with Frank Burke) Contemporary Perspectives on Federico Fellini (University of Toronto Press, 2002). She has also published widely on Italian cinema, Renaissance literature, virtual reality, border art, and feminist theory. to top of page