Subverting the Order: The Representation of Women Emigrants in the Press and in Visual Arts (Italy, c. XIX-XX)

Online Conference
10-11 January 2025

Organisers: Sara Delmedico (University of Bologna) and Loreta Gandolfi (University of Cambridge)

Call for Papers
In 1900, while returning by boat from the United States to Italy, Emma Quazza met Gaetano Bresci. They spent some time together and, after his arrest, the police found her name among his notes and immediately arrested her, too. Shortly after, charges against her were dropped and she was released. If Emma’s involvement and her connections with dissidents of the time are yet to be fully explored and confirmed, we can still argue that she lived her life far from the stereotyped image of the domestic woman: she had emigrated to the United States, travelled and returned to Italy. But how she was depicted by the press and in visual arts? Despite noteworthy works like Donne e uomini migranti. Storie e geografie tra breve e lunga distanza, edited by Angiolina Arru, Daniela Luigia Caglioti, and Franco Ramella (2008) or the useful chapter on emigrating women in Victoria Calabrese’s Italian Women in Basilicata: Staying Behind but Moving Forward during the. Age of Mass Emigration, 1876-1914 (2022), a systematic analysis of the images of the ordinary women who emigrated, and also decided to return, has yet to appear.
This interdisciplinary conference aims to pioneer investigation of an otherwise neglected area of study where women were ‘part of the picture’, and yet seemingly appearing marginal, and to explore the image(s) of women emigrants through the lens of the press and visual arts in Italy.
We invite submissions of proposals both for individual papers and for panels addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:
- What did women emigrants experience abroad?
- How was their life? Why did they choose to migrate?
- Why did they choose to return?
- What tropes about such women were formed in public discourse?
- How these women appeared in court record, in the press and in films?
- What role they occupied in their environment?
- What function they served in the narratives of courts, the press and films?
- Did they have prominent roles?
- Which were perceived as their “roles” in the narrative of migration?
- Did they have just an accompaniment role or were they just perceived in this way?

Individual paper proposals should consist of a title, an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 200 words). Panels should consist of three papers and each proposal should include a title, the names of participants, abstracts (max. 300 words each) and a short bio of the participants (max. 200 words). Papers and panels can be proposed either in English or in Italian.
Please submit your proposal for either a paper or a panel to the conference organisers Sara Delmedico (sara.delmedico @unibo.it) and Loreta Gandolfi (lbg22 @cam.ac.uk).
The deadline for submission of paper/panel proposals is 15 November 2024. Notification of inclusion in the conference will be sent by 30 November 2024.

The conference is organised with the support of the University of Bologna (Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies GEMMA Erasmus Mundus), the University of Cambridge (Section of Italian, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics), the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities, Archivio di Storia delle Donne di Bologna.