Category Archives: Conferences

“Recent Pirandello Scholarship in the US” Panel – Calandra Italian American Institute, March 11 at 6 pm

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Unfortunately, due in part to the coronavirus outbreak, the event has been postponed. We’ll let you know of a future date when it becomes available.

 

Through a presentation of two recent books by Giuseppe Faustini, Professor of Italian at Skidmore College, the panel will discuss the state of affairs of recent scholarship in the United States. Professor Faustini’s two books are: Luigi Pirandello, studi e ricerche (Metauro Edizioni, 2017) and Un amore primaverile. Inediti di Luigi Pirandello e Jenny (Pagliai Editori, 2019). Professors Stefano Boselli (CUNY) and Maria Rosaria Vitti-Alexander (Nazareth College) will join Professor Faustini. Moderated by Anthony Julian Tamburri.

Calandra Italian American Institute, 25 W 43rd St #17, New York, NY 10036 @ 6 pm

 

 

Call for Papers: “Breaking the Fourth Wall: Experimental Theatre from Six Characters to Today” – 2021 MLA Convention, Toronto

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In recognition of the 100-year anniversary of the first performance of Luigi Pirandello’s landmark 1921 play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, this guaranteed panel will consider the role that experimental theatre played during the years of the historical avant-garde and the broader implications of that experimentation across the 20th century and today.

Luigi Pirandello’s theatrical innovations were important for the modernist transition away from naturalist and realist conventions of a “fourth wall” constructed to enclose a discrete world on the stage. He engaged with numerous avant-garde figures who were active in that shift, and he influenced generations to follow. Pirandello’s attempt with Six Characters to break that fourth wall and experiment with meta- and absurdist theatre was met with incomprehension and outrage at its first run: the audience disrupted the performance in Rome with shouts of “Madhouse!” Yet, only a year later the play had its premiere on Broadway and within a few years it was met with high esteem in Europe and America, an esteem that has continued to this day. The works of Bertolt Brecht, Thornton Wilder, and Samuel Beckett would soon follow, and the norms of theatre in the West were forever changed by the mid-20th century.

We seek proposals that consider metatheatre, absurdist theatre, and other forms of experimental performance (dance, performance art, etc.) that are in conversation with the historical avant-garde figures who effectively broke down the fourth wall. In light of Six Characters centennial and its foundational place in the history of metatheatre, we are particularly interested in proposals that consider Pirandello and this seminal play’s role in opening a new space for representation between the audience and the stage. 

Abstracts of ~300 words and short bios should be sent to Julianne VanWagenen (vanwagen@umich.edu) and Michael Subialka (msubialka@ucdavis.edu) by March 20, 2020. 

This is a guaranteed panel for the 2021 MLA Convention in Toronto (January 7-10, 2021).

PSA Panel at the Modern Language Association 2020 Conference in Seattle

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The Pirandello Society session at the MLA convention is scheduled for

Saturday, January 11, 2020

10:15 AM – 11:30 AM

489 It’s All Relative: Modernism and Science

Washington State Convention Center, Room 603

For the full conference program, see this link.

 

Joshua R. Galat: Virginia Woolf and a Climate of Uncertainty

Abstract

This presentation locates Virginia Woolf’s final two novels, The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), within the formative years of quantum physics and the interwar period to explore her depictions of uncertain weather conditions as expressions of the cultural anxieties surrounding the shifting epistemological and political landscape. Developed and popularized during the 1920s and early 30s, quantum physics revolutionized science and revealed that the certainty of Newtonian physics was fundamentally misguided. Simultaneously, Fascism was spreading throughout Europe, threatening England’s sovereignty and way of life. In her diaries and letters, Woolf reveals that she eagerly read about and discussed quantum physics with her friends and associates even as they dealt with the increasing likelihood of another global war. At a more personal level, Woolf’s lifelong struggles with mental illness peaked during these years, contributing to her eventual suicide in 1941.In this presentation, I examine The Years and Between the Acts within the context of these scientific, cultural, and personal ends of certainty to argue that Woolf employed the weather in her writing as a means of grappling with the surging prevalence of uncertainty in her life. After offering an overview of quantum physics and Woolf’s exposure to key ideas, I explain their effects on her literary imagination during the 1930s and the intensifying role of the weather in her personal writings. Then, turning my attention to The Years and Between the Acts, I examine the symbolic dimensions of the weather in relation to the plots and lives of the characters. Overall, I contend that Woolf uses the weather to probe the domestic implications—both in terms of England and modernist subjectivity—of a climate of uncertainty as she conceptualizes a new, scientifically-grounded framework for perceiving the future.

Bio: Joshua R. Galat is currently completing his Ph.D. in Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University. His dissertation, “Engaging the Unknowable: Modernism, Science, and Print,” explores the ways in which print culture facilitated dialogue and ideological exchange between modernism and the new physics of the early twentieth century. He has published three peer-reviewed articles in modernist studies, the most recent of which is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Literature.

 

Samuel Heidepriem: Robert Musil’s Encyclopedia of the Sciences

Abstract

Austrian modernist Robert Musil’s magnum opus The Man Without Qualities (1930; 1933) famously opens with a meteorological report describing the barometric pressure, isothermal shifts, and water vapor level on a summer day in 1913. This is one of countless instances in which the novel integrates detailed scientific discourse, from the third-person narrator’s impromptu discussions of relativity and particle physics to the intellectual pursuits of the protagonist, Ulrich, a mathematician, scientist, and engineer. Ulrich’s problem is that, despite the wealth of culture and knowledge available to him in fin de siècle Vienna, he cannot choose a definite path for his life or thought—this makes him a “man without qualities.” One consequence is that his scientific explorations—like the narrator’s scientific digressions—are sporadic and never yield a consistent trajectory.

I argue that Musil’s novel depicts the difficulty of incorporating scientific knowledge into an encyclopedic unity, an ambition embodied in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, whose philosophical system assigns explicit positions and functions to scientific disciplines in the overall scheme of absolute knowledge. But Hegel, writing in the early 1800s, has a very different idea than Musil of what constitutes science. They are separated by the scientific upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which further complicate Hegel’s encyclopedic project. But what is difficult for philosophy, I argue, may be better suited to the novelistic form. Musil’s novel integrates scientific discourse in a way that shows the limitations of philosophical approaches like Hegel’s while presenting its own encyclopedic alternative.

I emphasize two aspects of this modernist encyclopedic novel: first, it prioritizes multiplicity over unity in its representation of science. Instead of cohering to a prior conceptual scheme, scientific knowledge appears in The Man Without Qualities as a multitude with no obvious center. Second, it presents scientific insight as occasional and unpredictable—often the result of a felicitous encounter or sudden memory—rather than planned and controlled.

Bio: Samuel Heidepriem is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his PhD from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at University of Michigan in 2017. His research focuses on German literature from the Enlightenment to the present, political theory, and intellectual history.

 

Ana Ilievska: The Imitation Game: Norbert Wiener, Author of Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio?

Abstract

An operator imitating the impassibility and workings of his machine; an actress imitating a tiger; a camera imitating biological processes; and a film company imitating society and the cosmos—these are some of the mimetic relations at the basis of Luigi Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio Operatore (1915, 1925). Similar relations between mechanisms and organisms will later become fundamental for what Norbert Wiener established as the field of cybernetics, the science of communication and control in inanimate and animate entities. But before such terms as “cybernetics” and “cyborg” were coined around the mid-twentieth century and sparked the popular imagination, the figure of the man-machine had already entered the world of fiction, challenging what it means to be human and demanding new modes of (modernist? posthuman? postmodern?) relationality and communication.

This paper takes a Borgesian approach to Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio and its author, and explores the mimetic and symbiotic interactions between the film camera and the main human protagonist Serafino Gubbio, as if the novel had been written by Norbert Wiener, the author of Cybernetics (1948). The figure of the cyborg is at the center of my paper’s analysis which is structured around the following questions: To what purpose and extent does Serafino Gubbio merge with and imitate the camera (“two legs, a torso, and, on top, a machine”)? What is at stake when he speaks of “impassibility” and a “thing-like silence” as desirable or perhaps even required qualities in “times like these, times of machines,” and what are the implications thereof? Approaching the Quaderni from such a playful but therefore and also ultimately Pirandellian point of view opens up new critical pathways for the Sicilian Nobel Laureate’s work within a technological context, simultaneously providing Wiener’s foundational book with its, well, missing cyborg protagonist (Ronald Kline 2009).

Bio: Ana Ilievska is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She completed her BA and MA in Romance Studies and International Literatures at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Her dissertation and research focus on human-machine interactions in late nineteenth/early twentieth century novels from Southern Europe (Italy and Portugal). She has taught a self-designed undergraduate course on “Literature and Technology from Frankenstein to the Futurists” at the University of Chicago. Currently she is conducting dissertation research on a Fulbright scholarship (2018-2019) at the Università degli Studi di Catania where she is part of the Centro di Informatica Umanistica’s team working on the Edizione Nazionale Digitale of Pirandello’s opera omnia.

 

Kara Watts: Quantum Theory, Feminism, and “Invisible” Influence in Interwar British Literary Imagination

Abstract

This paper takes up the impact of physics—specifically, the philosophical problems posed by work in quantum theory and cosmology from Erwin Schrödinger, James Jeans, and Niels Bohr—upon writer Sylvia Townsend Warner’s feminist literary imagination in interwar Britain. Specifically, I aim to examine how physics and feminism shared a discourse of invisible influence. By “invisible influence,” I mean those forces, energies, and properties that are just beyond the realm of ordinary physical visibility. In the early decades of the twentieth century, quantum theory was beginning to set itself apart from classical physics by attending to atomic, unseen forces upon the physical, visible world. This work was not restricted to specialist audiences, but was disseminated through popular publications, lectures, and controversies. From Schrödinger’s famed thought experiment, to Bohr’s research on the constitution of atomic nuclei and their transmutations, to Jeans’s work on cloud density that led to the publication of his immensely popular book The Mysterious Universe (1930), developments in physics were pushed into popular cultural imagination.

In the years prior to many of these developments’ arrival to public knowledge, Warner wrote two novels in short succession that aimed to understand similarly invisible, quotidian forces. These forces were not atomic, however, but structural—they were invisible structures that maintained women’s sociopolitical and economic inequality in British society. (Warner was not alone in her inquiry – her interest in invisible forces is akin to what Virginia Woolf explains in Three Guineas [1938] as the toxic “atmosphere” of British colonialist and patriarchal thought that maintained the oppression of women and colonial subjects.) Warner represents the physical realm of British daily life as already exerting invisible influence and constraint upon its inhabitants. Through philosophical shift and leaps of belief, however, this realm could be dramatically altered. For example, the structural limits placed on women’s lives in Lolly Willowes (1926) are so strong that the novel’s protagonist turns to the supernatural to gain invisible control over her own life in ways imperceptible to those around her. Similarly, in her novel Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927) the limits of colonialism render a British Christian missionary’s struggles teaching a young boy mathematics on a remote South Seas island into a crisis of colonialism’s continued invisible restrictions on epistemology.

Ultimately, I find that Warner’s knowledge of popular scientific developments along with her personal correspondence with James Jeans grew into a feminist literary aesthetic of invisible influence that, like quantum physics, held radical potential for ideological change during the interwar period.

Bio: Kara Watts recently completed her PhD in English at The University of Rhode Island. Her dissertation, “Charmed Modernisms: Fantasies of Sociality and Difference in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature,” argues that literary modernists’ unusual attention to the aesthetic notion of charm can be read as a concern for sociopolitical and identity difference. Her most recent publications include an article in Feminist Modernist Studies, “Designing Women: Gertrude Stein, Mass Culture, and the Formation of the Female Body” (February 2019), and a forthcoming collection from The University Press of Florida, Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (April 2019), co-edited with Molly Volanth Hall and Robin Hackett. She is currently an instructor of Gender & Women’s Studies at URI.

NeMLA 2020 Panel – Call for Papers

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Pirandello and Scientific Revolution

This panel investigates the influence that scientific advances in the modern(ist) era had on Luigi Pirandello and his contemporaries. The scientific revolutions occurring across the 19th and the 20th centuries put literature and the arts in a prolific dialogue with fields as diverse as technology, industry, architecture, and physics (among others). Discoveries and advances in this time period inspired and reshaped the work of Pirandello and his fellow intellectuals, impacting their thought and modernist writing style. We aim to shed light on the intersection of art with narratives of scientific progress as well as specific scientific advances, on the one hand, and on the role that Pirandello and his contemporaries played in defining the modernist intellectual trends of the moment, on the other.

Description:

This panel investigates the influence that scientific advances in the modern(ist) era had on Luigi Pirandello and his contemporaries, spanning scientific disciplines and fields such as technology, industry, and architecture. How did discoveries and advances in this time period inspire and reshape the work of Pirandello and his fellow intellectuals? What is the relationship between these advances and these writers’ reshaping of modernist style?

Session Chair: Lisa Sarti

Please submit your abstract (max 300 words) through the following web site URL by September 30th, 2019:

https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18215

Call for Papers: “It’s All Relative: Modernism and Science” 2020 MLA Convention, Seattle

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This guaranteed panel will consider how advances in math, science, and technology reshaped the literary imagination of writers during the long modernist period, as well as how the philosophical outlooks that were influenced by or in conversation with these advances interacted with that literary imagination. The modernist period was a time of great discovery in arenas that affected both the texture of daily lived life and also conceptions of humans’ place in the universe as well as the shape and workings of the universe itself. The first quarter of the 20th century alone witnessed monumental advances in fields as diverse as transportation, nuclear physics, and astrophysics; the Wright brothers took flight, Ernest Rutherford proved the structure of the nucleus, and Edward Hubble discovered galaxies outside of our Milky Way. Scholars are, of course, aware that such advances constitute an important part of the intellectual context for modernist writing. Our aim here is to consider whether previously unexplored connections or ideas link specific aspects of this developing outlook to modernists and/or modernism.

We thus seek proposals that consider how these advances in scientific thinking—which across the 19th and 20th centuries dialogued ever more closely with philosophy—opened new spaces in the artistic mind, allowing for innovative fantastical imagining, unprecedented metaphysical and ontological contemplation, and a redefining of traditional binaries, such as possible/impossible. Like many of his near contemporaries, Luigi Pirandello’s novels and plays appear to be the fruit of an intellect that was steeped in and colored by current scientific progress. How were writers like Pirandello influenced by science? And what can we learn by considering their work in relation to these great strides in the scientific realm?

With this notion in mind, we are interested in topics such as (but not limited to) the following:

Modernism and:

·         The micro (nuclear)

·         The macro (cosmological)

·         The impossible

·         The invisible real

·         The movement of bodies and energy

·         Conceptions of materialism

·         Intellectual history

·         Math

·         Electrical illumination

·         Flight

·         Relativity

·         New conceptions of evolution

This guaranteed session is sponsored by the Pirandello Society of America. However, we encourage submissions not only on Pirandello but on any pertinent modernist figure(s), movement(s), or text(s) relevant to the panel topics.

Abstracts of ~300 words and short bios should be sent to Julianne VanWagenen (vanwagen@umich.edu) and Michael Subialka (msubialka@ucdavis.edu) by March 13, 2019.

This is a guaranteed panel for the 2020 MLA Convention in Seattle (January 9-12, 2020), sponsored by the Pirandello Society of America.

Modern Language Association Convention – New York 2018

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The Pirandello Society session at the MLA convention is scheduled for

Friday, January 05, 2018
03:30 PM – 04:45 PM
372 Negotiating Identities: From Pirandello to Today

Hilton – Concourse D

For the full conference program, see this link.

Laura A. Lucci: Pirandellian Uncertainty: The Theatre as Laboratory

Abstract:

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle suggests a limit to the precision with which complementary variables can be measured.  For example, in observing a particle’s position and velocity, the measurement of one variable becomes less exact as the other becomes better defined.  A similar problem exists in Pirandello’s drama, as his characters negotiate the divide between self-understanding and socially constructed identities.  Figures like Signora Ponza or Henry IV, with their indeterminate and occasionally volatile identities, dominate Pirandellian narratives, highlighting the complex question of who a person is, what they can be, and how circumstances influence their understanding of themselves and others.  Even Pirandello’s defining aesthetic, l’umorismo, resists simplicity, at once denoting a temporal extension from laughter to sympathy as well as the moment of intersection between these two emotional states.

Pirandello’s dramatic output not only tests the limits of theatrical convention and practice, but offers an inquiry into the nature of identity, social structures, and human interaction.  In short, the locus of Pirandello’s theatre was not simply the nature of representation, but an investigation into the limits and possibilities of that representation.  Using the theatre as a kind of laboratory, Pirandello scrutinizes the human condition within the confines of theatrical practice and space, mitigating the distance between dramatic representation and self-understanding.

This paper will examine what contemporary scientific inquiry and its aesthetic consequences (such as that of quantum theory) might bring to bear on understanding Pirandellian drama and the interrogations of identity and being contained therein.

 Bio: Laura A. Lucci teaches dramatic history and literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.  She received her PhD at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto in April 2017.  Her doctoral thesis, Pirandello’s Dramaturgy of Time, examines three of Luigi Pirandello’s majors plays at their intersections with contemporary theories of time, temporality, and being.  She has been published in PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, and has written for the web at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and Nightswimming Theatre.  Her research interests include 20th-century Italian Theatre, Modernism, Italian Renaissance performance and spectacle, and the aesthetic consequences of science and philosophy. Her practical background is comprised largely of translation, dramaturgical support, and technical production. Laura is affiliated with The Pirandello Society of America, The Modern Language Association, and The Midwest Modern Language Association.

 

Alberica Bazzoni: The (Un)Masking of Patriarchal Power in Pirandello’s Plays

 

Abstract

Pirandello’s literary and theatrical production engages extensively with the troubled relationship between the sexes, often proposing a rather conservative, when not plainly sexist, perspective on gender roles. Far more experimental on a theoretical than on a social level, Pirandello never directly questions the boundaries of patriarchy. However, the crisis of identity he represents is also the crisis of an ideal harmony within the traditional family, as well as the crisis of a stable, hegemonic masculinity. While some critics have seen in Pirandello’s works mainly or exclusively the reinforcement of patriarchal structures (Caesar 1990; 1992; Günsberg 1994), others have exalted the author’s representation of the female ‘other’ as the positive pole of his discourse on identity and knowledge (Martinelli 1992; Bini 1999). In between these opposite views, my contribution points out a tension between replication and contestation of the patriarchal script in Pirandello’s works. In fact, in a number of plays Pirandello unmasks gender roles as the product of patriarchal power, offering the spectacle of male characters who try to write, silence, control and objectify the female ones. The aspect of domination inherent in this process becomes apparent when female characters ‘talk back’, offering an alternative view to the self-righteous narratives of male characters, as in the case of the struggle between the Stepdaughter and the Father in Six Characters in Search of an Author, and when male versions are revealed as more or less culpable fantasies, such as in Ludovico Nota’s and Grotti’s accounts of Ersilia Drei’s motivations in Clothing the Naked. Furthermore, in later plays such as Lazarus and The Mountain Giants, Pirandello exposes masculine insecurities and strategies of domination by creating polyphonic scenes in which the female perspective emerges strongly. The result is a fractured, humoristic discourse, which reproduces patriarchal gender roles while at the same time casting a doubt on them – that they may well be a constrictive mask that men impose on women; and on themselves.

Bio: Alberica Bazzoni is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, working on a project on gender and the Italian Literary Canon. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, where she then taught Italian language and literature as Lector and Non-Stipendiary Lecturer. Her research interests include Modern Italian Literature, Literary Theory, Political Philosophy and Gender and Sexuality Studies, and she has published on Mark Turner, Adriana Cavarero, Goliarda Sapienza, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello. Her PhD thesis, Writing for Freedom: Body, Identity and Power in Goliarda Sapienza’s Narrative, won the ‘2015 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Women’s Studies’ and is forthcoming in 2018.

 

Lisa Sarti “Who Am I? Who Am I Not? – Agency and (Dis)identification in Luigi Pirandello’s The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator”

 

Abstract

The sixth of Luigi Pirandello’s seven novels, The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1925) tells about the experience of Serafino Gubbio at Kosmograph, the film studio where he is employed as a camera operator, monotonously winding the film reel. Besides addressing the world of silent films, The Notebooks prefigures the modernist quest for a definition of art as a porous field in which divergent media intertwine with their own expressive languages, and theorizes the dehumanization of mechanization.

The Notebooks lingers over the contemporary fascination with the machine age and its hallmarks—speed, efficiency, progress, and modernity—in order to confront the disparity between reality and imagination. The result of that faith, Pirandello shows in the book, is a profound impact on the individual and his identity. Through the protagonist’s perspective, Pirandello voiced his own obsession with the increasing prominence of machinery in everyday life and its desensitizing consequences. Serafino’s attitude about his degrading task and his anxiety for the machine “swallowing” up his identity reveal Pirandello’s own skepticism about technological progress, particularly its tendency to cause self-estrangement. Bewildered by his own transformation, Serafino cries, “I ceased to be Gubbio and became a hand.”

 

This paper investigates the existential repercussions of the new medium in Serafino’s life, and, more importantly, the tensions and contradictions that inevitably complicate the search of his own identity and his attempts to dis-identify with the camera. If, on the one hand, Serafino laments the necessity of his absolute “impassivity” while filming and his being reduced to a mere “handle,” on the other he contradicts himself by proudly assessing his human agency in the filmic process, “one cannot find a machine that can regulate its movements according to the action that is going on in front of the camera.” Serafino conceitedly states his skillful turning of the handle, which is faster or slower according to the speed he deems appropriate to the scene he is shooting. Film technique is here not only functional to our understanding of the character’s psychology, but it also conveys Serafino’s eagerness to get involved with the action in front of the camera, despite his numerous claims to the contrary throughout the novel and his tendency to characterize his ‘self’ as an object. Serafino seeks control, but he also seeks to affirm his creativity and the superiority of human intervention over the machinery.

Film-theory and the new technological reality of the medium intertwine with Serafino’s feelings, ambitions, and multifaceted identity. Ultimately, these tensions emerge as an integral part of the narrative texture and one of the most disquieting traits of Modernity.

 

Bio: Lisa Sarti received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from The City University of New York. She is Assistant Professor of Italian at BMCC – The City University of New York in Manhattan. Her main field of research is fin-de-siècle visual culture, fiction, and the performing arts. She has published articles on Arrigo Boito, Melodrama, Annie Vivanti and the Female artists of the Cafè Chantant, American musical theater, and Pirandello’s storytelling and theatre, as well the cinematic adaptation of his short stories. She co-edited (with Michael Subialka) the volume Pirandello’s Visual Philosophy: Imagination and Thought Across Media (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2017) and she is currently working on a book on the aesthetics of spectatorship in Italy between 1820 and 1900.

PSA Conference – Global Legacies: Pirandello across Centuries and Media – 16 September 2017

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The Pirandello Society of America presents its one-day conference

“Global Legacies – Pirandello across Centuries and Media”

Saturday 16 September 2017, 8:00 am – 6:30 pm

Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park Ave, New York City

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Luigi Pirandello’s birth, this one-day conference sponsored by the Pirandello Society of America seeks a broad spectrum of contributions that evaluate and illuminate Pirandello’s legacies on world theatre, literature, cinema, and other media over a period of more than a hundred years. We encourage contributions that are interdisciplinary and engage with a variety of theoretical models when looking at Pirandello’s work and its multifaceted resonance.

English is the official language of the Conference.

Keynote Speaker: Pietro Frassica, Princeton University

Attendance is free and open to the public.

The full program for the conference is available. Click here to read.

For further information about The Pirandello Society of America please visit our website at: http://pirandellosociety.org/ and Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pirandellosocietyofamerica/

The Pirandello Society of America is pleased to be featured among a series of international conferences being held across the globe in honor of Pirandello’s 150th anniversary: Pirandello International 2017, Pirandello in a Globalized World. From Agrigento to Rome, Johannesburg to Munich, these events demonstrate the world-spanning reach of Pirandello’s influence today. More information and the full calendar for the international conference series can be found online: http://pirandello.eu/international2017/

Pirandello at 150 – MLA 2017 Panel in Philadelphia

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Join us for the upcoming PSA panel at the Philadelphia Marriott for the session

“Pirandello at 150″

Saturday, 7 January

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 404, Philadelphia Marriott

Program arranged by the Pirandello Society of America

Presiding: Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni, Baruch Coll., City Univ. of New York

1. “One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand: Images of Pirandello between World War II and the Translational Turn,” Michael Roessner, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich

2. “Pirandello’s Thought and the South,” Alessandra Sorrentino, EPẒ-Munich

3. “The Legacy of Il fu Mattia Pascal and Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore in Italian Literature,” Nicolino Applauso, James Madison Univ.

Respondent: Michael Subialka, Univ. of California, Davis. (formerly Univ. of Oxford, St. Hugh’s Coll.)

For abstracts, click here.

Pirandello in the New Millennium: Innovative Approaches and Methods. NeMLA Convention in Hartford, CT 17-20 March 2016

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Organized by Lisa Sarti (BMCC, The City University of New York) and Michael Subialka (Oxford University)

Session Chair and Respondent: Lisa Sarti (BMCC, The City University of New York)

Paola Basile (Lake Erie College), Learn with Pirandello
Anna Santucci (Brown University), Staging Pirandello: bridging the gap between language and literature through drama
Michela Ronzani (University of North Carolina School of the Arts), Pirandello and the others: Teaching Pirandello to Theater Students
Francesca Facchi (University of Toronto), The Many Lives of Pirandello’s “Questa sera si recita a soggetto”
Stephen Donatelli (New York University), Pirandello and the Risks of Succeeding

Call for papers: Pirandello: Performativity and Role-Playing

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The Society for Pirandello Studies one-day conference

in collaboration with the Italian Department at the University of Edinburgh

Pirandello: Performativity and Role-Playing

Saturday 17 October 2015

University of Edinburgh: 50 George Square, Project room.

The annual one-day conference of the Society for Pirandello Studies aims to embrace a wide variety of methods and approaches to Pirandello’s œuvre, and to bring together theatre professionals, critics and scholars representing a range of disciplines. This year’s conference focuses on a quintessential Pirandellian theme, namely that of role-playing, within the contemporary framework of performativity theory. Particularly welcome are contributions that relate Pirandello’s texts to different media and/or genres. Abstracts of c.200 words (in English) for papers of 20 minutes’ duration should be sent to Enza De Francisci at e.francisci@ucl.ac.uk.

The deadline for abstracts is Friday 21 August 2015.

For further information about The Society for Pirandello Studies, including membership and Pirandello Studies (the annual journal), please visit our website at http://www.ucd.ie/pirsoc/ and Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SocietyForPirandelloStudies.