Dr. Teresa Fiore Keynote Speaker at Rutgers University’s Italian Graduate Student Conference (Nov. 18, 2023)
Posted in: CHSS News, CHSS Newsletter, Homepage News and Events, Inserra, World Languages and Cultures
Dr. Teresa Fiore (Professor of Italian and Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies) was invited to give a keynote speech at the graduate student conference of the Italian Department of Rutgers University held on Nov. 17-18, 2023. This year, the topic of this bi-annual conference organized by the Italian Graduate Society was “Masks.” Dr. Fiore’s keynote was titled “Masking as Re-Invention: Secrets and Lies in Italian-Language Texts about Migration and Adoption.” In exploring the works of such writers as Igiaba Scego, Amir Issaa, Espérance Hakuzwimana, and Nikolai Prestia, the talk brought together Fiore’s main research field, Migration Studies, and the new field she is now focusing on, Critical Adoption Studies (Dr. Fiore is currently teaching an Honors class titled “Narrating Adoption: Choice, Chance and Circumstance”).
Held at the Eagleton Institute of the Rutgers’ Cook/Douglass campus, the conference included papers on a wide array of topics from masking as forging in antiquity as well as today with AI; masking as an essential and ever-evolving part of Commedia dell’Arte; masking as hiding corruption in films about Fascism and Nazism; and masking as a folk tradition revisited in contemporary environment-conscious fashion, among others. The second keynote speaker for the conference was Prof. Ronald L. Martinez from Brown University whose talk was titled “Terence’s Eunuch as Mask: Disguising/Disclosing Carnal Desire in Petrarch and Boccaccio.”
Short url: tinyurl.com/RUMasks