Italian Voices: Oral and Written Cultures in Early Modern Italy – Call For Papers

Italian Voices: Oral and Written Cultures in Early Modern ItalySchool of Music, University of Leeds
Thursday 5-Friday 6 September, 2013

This conference is being organized as part of the project ‘Oral culture,manuscript and print in early modern Italy, 1450-1700’, funded by the European Research Council. It will investigate how Italian oral culture was related to written culture in this period and how far it was independent of writing. For further information on the project, please visit our website: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italianvoices.

Confirmed speakers: Peter Burke (Cambridge), Elizabeth Cohen (Toronto), Thomas Cohen (Toronto), Massimo Firpo (Turin), Rob Henke (St Louis), Robert Kendrick (Chicago), Françoise Waquet (Paris).

Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

  • Performances of texts in public and private spaces
  • Musical settings of texts
  • Reading aloud to others
  • Improvisation of texts
  • Religious and political oratory
  • Orality in learned and popular culture
  • Linguistic variety and usage in performed texts
  • Transcribing performed texts

To propose an individual paper of twenty minutes, in English or in Italian, or a session of three papers, please send a title and 200-word abstract for each paper, and contact information and a brief (one-page) curriculum vitae for each speaker, to italianvoices@leeds.ac.uk. Round-table sessions relating to methodological issues may also be proposed. Any queries should also be addressed to the same address.

Deadline for receipt of proposals: 31 January 2013.