California Italian Studies (CIS) is now accepting submissions for Volume 6 (2015). Submissions may be for either the thematic or the open-theme parts of the volume, in either English or Italian. Please direct inquires to volume editors Jack Greenstein or William Tronzo. Deadline for submission is April 15, 2015.

Part I. Scholarly essays, articles, interviews, and translations which address some aspect of the following special topic: Fixity and Flexibility: Italy and the Power of Images over Time
It has become commonplace to speak of images as having power and agency. This issue of CIS interrogates these notions by investigating how images have mediated Italian identities across the grand arc of history from late Antiquity to the present. We seek in particular studies of images associated with religious and secular groups, including families, organizations, institutions, orders, cities, and social classes, or images that have functioned in discourse, debate, polemic, and propaganda about such entities or about Italian art, culture, or identity in whole or in part. Among the questions to be addressed are how images and works of art have come to be associated with particular groups, ideologies and critical positions; what role, if any, they have had in creating, defining, or shaping the groups and ideas with which they were connected; how they have provided a fixed focus or catalyst for corporate behavior, values and pride, or for the critical positions about Italian art and culture that they were cited to support; how their significance and use and sometimes even the images and works themselves have changed over time, and how these changes have been connected with (or disconnected from) the groups and ideas that they have symbolized; how their display and circulation, both in the ‘original’ and in copies, reproductions, and variants have been connected with, or independent from, their symbolic associations; and how they have affected the social spaces and cultural vehicles where they have been exhibited, displayed or reproduced and seen. What can we say, if anything, about the power or agency of these images in mediating identities? Or are their functions and force the results of the imposition of symbolic values by those who have used them for their own purposes? We invite submissions that explore the multiple facets of art, images and symbols in Italian culture from any period and from all the various fields that approach the question, including but not limited to art history and visual studies, media studies, music, anthropology and sociology, history and political science, philosophy, religious studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

Part II. Scholarly essays, articles, interviews, and translations with a significant Italian component on any topic that meets one or more of the following basic criteria:

a) interdisciplinary work that combines within itself the practices of multiple disciplines, makes significant use of the tools of one discipline in the service of another, or relates to a cluster of other scholarly works, representing the approaches of multiple disciplines to a single topic;

b) comparative work placing the study of the history, culture, society, artistic products, and languages of the Italian peninsula and islands, and of Italian diasporas, in relation to other geographical, cultural, and linguistic formations;

c) critically reflexive work that not only studies a given object but also engages in theoretical and/or methodological reflection on its own approach and on its implications within larger disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts.