“Diversity and Decolonization in Italian Studies”
Dates: May 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12
Time: 9:30-11:00 AM (for all dates)
Please register via Zoom here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vd-6rpjouHNPN49rAKoVL8AfqwcsrGyff
Organizers: Gaoheng Zhang (University of British Columbia), Simone Brioni (Stony Brook University), Marie Orton (Brigham Young University), Graziella Parati (Dartmouth College)
Representatives from several universities have organized a global roundtable series via Zoom to discuss:
- How the concept of diversity has been applied to Italian culture
- How the Italian curriculum can be diversified given the recent “postcolonial” (Ponzanesi 2012) and “transnational” (Bond 2014) turns in Italian Studies
- The specific contributions that Italian Studies can make to the debate about diversity
Background: In recent years, a debate has arisen in modern languages, literatures, and cultural studies regarding the need to diversify their curricula in higher education. To mention only a few examples, a symposium on “Diversity in Italian Studies” was organized at the Calandra Italian American Institute (at the City University of New York) in 2019, and similar conversations have occurred in the fields of French Studies (with a conference at the University of Lausanne in 2020) and German Studies (with conferences organized since 2017 by the collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum). Moreover, publications such as Johnathan D. Jansen’s Decolonization in Universities (2001) and Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nisancioglu, and Dalia Gebrialc’s Decolonizing the University (2018) have investigated and proposed ideas to decolonize higher education.