During June of 2018, two Italian PhD students presented at the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) Conference in Sorrento, Italy. Lauren De Camilla, a PhD candidate in her fifth year, shared the basis of her article, currently under review for L’avventura International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes entitled, “Queering the Final Girl in New Italian Horror Cinema.” The article aims to shed light on contemporary Italian Horror cinema, which has experienced a sharp increase in film production since 2005, with a critical analysis of two films: La terza madre (Mother of Tears, Dario Argento, 2007) and In fondo al bosco (Deep in the Wood, Stefano Ludovichi, 2015). De Camilla’s highlight from the conference was reconnecting with former advisor Allison Cooper (Assistant Professor of Italian at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME), catching up with other mentors, and meeting new colleagues from other institutions. “It was amazing to reconnect with seasoned scholars that inspire me—and I only get to see them once or twice a year!” she said. Dan Paul, now in his sixth year of the program, presented a chapter of his dissertation, “Lost Fathers Found: Masculinity and Surrogate Fatherhood in Recent Italian Teen Film.” Paul’s work focuses on the representations of fatherhood, adolescents that become fathers through symbolical adoption, and non-biological fathers.
After the conference, De Camilla and Paul joined fellow graduate students Demetrio Antolini and Eric Scaltriti in Bologna, Italy for the first edition of the summer school “Mediating Italy in Global Culture,” a weeklong film symposium including lectures, working groups, and events sponsored by The University of Bologna, in collaboration with Brown University, Dickinson College, and Wesleyan University. Topics studied during the program included distribution, circulation, and reception of Italian audio-visual media within a national and global context (primarily in comparison with the United States). Each participant presented their work as part of the symposium, and for Paul, receiving engaged feedback and questions from both faculty and students was a very positive experience. “My project is very specific, so I did not expect as much of a response, but it was nice to see that colleagues had lots of questions and were genuinely interested in my work; that was a surprise,” said Paul.
Though both De Camilla and Paul are very busy with their dissertations, they hope to start an additional project that would allow up and coming scholars to share their work. This would be a forum that would welcome the submission of exciting and time sensitive work, which has not yet made it through the long wait of formal publication. The forum would provide a place for peer review and scholarly comments, and advanced scholars would be invited to contribute. While they are excited about this project, De Camilla and Paul are hoping to establish collaboration with a few more graduate students across the world before launching it.
