Programme

9.00 Registration

10.00 Opening remarks (room 105)
Camilla Miglio (Head of SEAI, Sapienza Università di Roma) and Riccardo Capoferro (Sapienza Università di Roma)

10.15 - 11.15 

Keynote lecture I - Room 105

Chair: Riccardo Capoferro (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Corinne Fowler (University of Leicester), Country Walks through Colonial Britain during the Culture War

11.15 - 11.45 Coffee break (room 204, 2nd floor)

11.45 – 13.15 

Parallel sessions I

Room 105

Panel 1 - Empire Lost, Empire Regained? 

Chair: Andrea Peghinelli (Sapienza)

• Caroline Gondaud (MEAE), L’Union européenne et les imaginaires impériaux 

• Katharina Clausius (Université de Montréal) & Claudia Clausius (King’s University College/Western), Imperial Music in the Republican Press: National(ist) Icons in Interwar Austria

• Valerio Cordiner (Sapienza Università di Roma), Vestiges de l’Empire. De la Françafrique à la Françamérique

Room 107

Panel 2 - Visions of India 

Chair: Asia Battiloro (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Arnab Das (Indian Institute of Technology Madras), Spectres of a Colonial Narco-State: 19th-Century Opium Trade and Its Postimperial Afterlives in Contemporary Indian Fiction

• Rocío G. Davis (University of Navarra), Romancing the Empire: M. M. Kaye’s Memoir and Novels as Imperial Validation

• Christiane Schlote (University of Basel), Commemorating Care: Indian Ayahs and Emotional Imperialism

Room 110

Panel 3 - Cultural Geographies 

Chair: Paolo D’Indinosante (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Katherine Baxter (Northumbria University), Desertification

• María Fernández Díaz (University of Oviedo), Necropolitics and Colonial State Violence in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (2021)

• Lamia Mecheri (Université d’Annaba), Avatar 2 : La Voie de l’eau de James Cameron, un film (néo) impérialiste ?

13.15 - 14.45 Lunch (room 204, 2nd floor)

14.45 – 16.45

Parallel sessions II

Room 105

Panel 4 - Fascism and Post-Fascism

Chair: Umberto Rossi (Independent Scholar)

• Franco Baldasso (Bard College, NY), Postcards from the Empire: The Long Journey through Fascism

• Claudia Sbuttoni (University of New Hampshire), Postwar Italy’s Refugee Re-Housing Projects: Urban Peripheries as Extension of Empire

• Kerry Gibbons (University of Warwick), Colonial Re-Imaginations: The Liberal Colony as a Narrative Setting in the Fascist-Era ‘Romanzo Coloniale’

• Federico C. Simonelli (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), The Bard of Submerged Imperialism: D’Annunzio and Nationalist Ideology in the Italian Imaginary after the Second World War

Room 107

Panel 5 - Post-Imperial Portrayals in Cinema and Television 

Chair: Luca Valleriani (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Teresa Sorolla & Víctor Mínguez (Universitat Jaume I), Afterlife of Queen Victoria in Cinema: Victoria & Abdul (Stephen Frears, 2017)

• Roxana Elena Doncu (Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy), Prince and Pauper: The British Monarchy, Their Imagined Transylvanian Roots and Imperial Nostalgia in Wild Carpathia

• Emiel Martens (University of Amsterdam & Erasmus University Rotterdam), Welcome to Paradise Island: The Interwoven History of Film, Tourism and Empire in Jamaica, 1891–1951

Room 110

Panel 6 - Old and New Landscapes

Chair: Katherine Baxter (Northumbria University)

• Mary Booth (University of Liverpool), Strategic Ambiguity: The Continued Influence of Empire and the Interpretive Evolution of Historic Houses in the United Kingdom

• Elizabeth Dillenburg (The Ohio State University at Newark), The Ozymandias of Delhi: Coronation Park and the Negotiation of Colonial Legacies in India

• Sean Ketteringham (University of Oxford), Enduring Coloniality: Georgian Heritage and Angus Acworth in the West Indies

• Leo Kadokura (University of Oxford), Distant Chimeras: The After-Effects of John Galsworthy and the Edwardian Novel

16.45 - 17.15 Coffee break (room 204, 2dn floor)

17.15 – 19.15 

Parallel sessions III

Room 105

Panel 7 - Displaying Empire

Chair: Franco Baldasso (Bard College, NY)

• Jeremy Walton (University of Rijeka), Between Inter-Imperial Violence and Inter-National Peace: A View from the Military Museums of Vienna and Istanbul

• Andrea Potts (The University of Brighton), The Afterlives of Imperialism: Public Engagement with Museum Exhibitions

• Briony Widdis & Emma Reisz (Queen’s University Belfast), Collecting Ambiguity: Material Objects and the Afterlives of Empire in Northern Ireland

• Rebekah Hodgkinson (University of Oxford), Constructing the Past in the Present: The National Trust and British Colonialism

Room 107

Panel 8 - Multimedial Empires

Chair: Tiziano De Marino (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Oded Feuerstein (Tel Aviv University), ‘I understand colonialism now and it terrifies me’: Ludic Imperialism and Victoria 3

• Paolo D’Indinosante (Sapienza Università di Roma), The Afterlife of Colonial Fiction in The Secret Games Company’s Kim

• Judith Neder (Technische Universität Dresden), Challenging Fundamentalism: Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints

Room 110

Panel 9 - Fiction and Colonial Memory

Chair: Alessandra Crotti (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Nicoletta Brazzelli (Università degli Studi di Milano), The Poetics of Memory in Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

• Eri Kobayashi (Seikei University), Memories of Empire in Caryl Phillips’s Novels

• Emma Parker (University of Bristol), The Baggage of Empire: Objects, Memory, and Colonial Whiteness in J. G. Ballard’s and Doris Lessing’s Life Writing

• Carmen Zamorano Llena (Dalarna University), Listening to the Precariousness of Post-Imperial Memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Friday, 22 September 2023

10.00 - 11.00 

Keynote lecture II - Room 105

Chair: Irene Ranzato (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Pablo Mukherjee (University of Oxford), Ghosts in the Machine: Famines and Afterlives of Empire

11.00 - 11.30 Coffee break (room 204, 2nd floor)

11.30 – 13.00 

Parallel sessions IV

Room 105

Panel 10 - Postcolonial Histories and Nation Building 

Chair: Paolo D’Indinosante (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Ann-Sofie Nielsen Gremaud (University of Iceland), New Friendships and Old Ties: Post-Colonial Relations between Iceland and Greenland

• Skirmantė Biržietienė & Eglė Gabrėnaitė (Vilnius University Kaunas Faculty), The Concept of Empire in Contemporary Lithuanian Public Discourse: A Corpus-Based Research

• Karl Hele (Mount Allison University), Anishinaabeg Countering Settler Imperial-Colonial Narratives through Performance, c. 1900 to Present

Room 107

Panel 11 - Gender, Memory, Empire

Chair: Caterina Romeo (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Noreen Kane (University College Cork), Intergenerational Memory in the Novels of Maaza Mengiste

• Nicole Fluhr (Southern Connecticut State University), Revision and/as Revolt: Tackling Empire’s Literary Legacies in Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women

• Giovanna Buonanno (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), Afterlives of Empire in Contemporary Black British Women’s Plays: Janice Okoh’s The Gift (2020)

13.00 - 14.30 Lunch (room 204, 2nd floor)

Room 105

Panel 13 - Ireland, Scotland and the Imperial Enterprise

Chair: Federica Perazzini (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Elena Ogliari (Università del Piemonte Orientale), The Legacy of the Empire as a Pandora’s Box in Today’s Irish Society and Culture

• David Clark (University of A Coruña), ‘A failed Byron’? The Birth of the Spy Novel and the Relationship between Ireland and the British Empire

• Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir (University of Iceland), Deadly Chauvinism and Damaging Imperial Legacies: Representations of the Arctic Venture in Scottish Literature

• Cristina Riaño Alonso (Independent Scholar), Agents of Empire: Narrating the Scottish Experience in Accra

Room 107

Panel 14 - Construction and Deconstruction of Race

Chair: Irene Ranzato (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Brett M. Bebber (Old Dominion University), Assessing Empire and Its Legacy: Visions of Imperial History and Race Relations Work in Britain

• Benjamin Bland (University of Reading), The Afterlives of Imperial Musicology: ‘Race’ and Musical Criticism in Britain after Empire

• Ayşe Ece Cavcav (Çankaya University), ‘Whiteness that could no longer be seen’: Mohsin Hamid’s Deconstruction and Subversion of Race and Racist Discourses in The Last White Man

• Ashok Malhotra (Queen’s University Belfast), Guy Wrench’s The Wheel of Health (1938) and Its Influence on Organic and Lifestyle Movements

16.30 - 17.00 Coffee break (room 204, 2nd floor)

Room 105

Panel 16 - American Empires 

Chair: Hal Coase (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Manuel López Forjas (Sapienza), In the Lion’s Den: The Mexican Writer Andrés Iduarte and His Criticism of Imperial Hegemony of Spain and the USA

• Jessica Maucione (Gonzaga University), The Noncontiguous US Imperial Frontier and Trans-Indigenous Literary Sovereignty in Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues and Velma Wallis’s Two Old Women

• Angela Mullis (Rutgers University), Decolonizing Histories in LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker

Room 107

Panel 17 - Germany and the Imperial Scene

Chair: Asia Battiloro (Sapienza Università di Roma)

• Gabriele Guerra (Sapienza), From the German Century to the American Century: Post-Imperial and Post-Narrative Strategies in Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012)

• Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Heidelberg University), August Engelhardt: ‘Cocovores’, the ‘Vegetal Likeness of God’ and ‘Death by Coconut’ in Imperial German New Guinea

• Umberto Rossi (Independent Scholar), The Preterite Empire: German Colonialism in Pynchon and Gurnah