Crossing Boundaries, Fostering Dialogue: Humanities, Academia and the City of Rome
October 19–20, 2026
“Crossing Boundaries, Fostering Dialogue” brings together a two-part program:
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Giornata di studi: Boundaries and Intersections in Premodern Italy (October 19), featuring interdisciplinary presentations by postdoctoral and early-career scholars
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Roundtable: Boundaries of Academia: Impact, Careers, and the Postdoctoral Condition (October 20), devoted to a discussion with senior academics on the professional and structural challenges facing early-career researchers
The initiative seeks to foster dialogue between premodern studies and contemporary academic concerns, placing particular emphasis on the notion of “boundaries” as both a heuristic and a critical problem.
Call for Papers
Boundaries and Intersections in Premodern Italy
October 19, 2026
The giornata di studi invites contributions that interrogate the concept of boundaries in its multiple configurations. Boundaries simultaneously define and destabilize: they shape identities, delimit canons, structure relations between inclusion and exclusion, and articulate distinctions such as sacred and secular, political and literary, human and non-human. Yet they remain inherently unstable—continuously negotiated, contested, and reconfigured across time and space.
Premodern culture offers particularly fertile ground for examining this fluidity. The porous threshold between theology and poetry in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, for instance, unsettles distinctions between revelation and fiction, authority and imagination—tensions that re-emerged in early modern engagements with Aristotle’s Poetics. Similarly, communities such as the Beguines occupied ambiguous positions between cloister and city, autonomy and obedience, while figures such as Hadewijch and Catherine of Siena complicate established gendered and ecclesiastical boundaries. At a broader level, the geographic and epistemological horizons opened by the voyages of discovery profoundly reshaped European understandings of the world and of the self.
These examples are intended as points of departure rather than limitation. The conference welcomes papers that trace further sites—textual, social, intellectual, or spiritual—where boundaries are constructed, contested, and transformed.
Submissions from early-career scholars (particularly, though not exclusively, those affiliated with the University of Notre Dame and Roma Tre University) working in fields including, but not limited to, history, literature, philosophy, theology, musicology, and cultural studies, are welcomed. Comparative and transnational perspectives are especially encouraged. The giornata di studi is conceived as a space for sustained scholarly exchange; work in progress is therefore warmly welcomed.
Suggested topics include:
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Disciplinary boundaries and forms of interdisciplinarity
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Political and cultural borders
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Religious and secular distinctions
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Marginality, centrality, and canon formation
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Linguistic, geographic, and epistemological frontiers
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Constructions of the human and the non-human
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Gendered boundaries, social roles, and structures of authority
Submission Guidelines
Proposals should include:
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Title
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Abstract (maximum 300 words)
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Short bio-bibliographical profile
Deadline: July 30, 2026
Submission platform: Submittable
Practical Information
Participation in the event is free of charge. Lunch and refreshments will be provided on both days.