EuARE Annual Conference

University of Vienna
8-12 July 2025

Download full Call for Proposals

Following the Second Vatican Council, Italian literature was prompted to reconsider its position in relation to a rapidly secularising world. The Council’s call for rethinking the Church exerted a particular influence on Italian writers and intellectuals, for whom the geographical and cultural proximity to the Vatican State gave these issues a particularly familiar dimension. From Pasolini’s reflections on the persistence of the sacred in the words of the poets, to Mario Luzi’s cosmological and Pauline research, which finds poetic expression in a dialogue with the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, to the influence of the figure of Christ and the philosophy and mysticism of Simone Weil upon Elsa Morante, Italian literature from the 20th century onwards has adopted and continues to adopt a progressive and productive approach to the theological dimensions of literary practice and human experience in a rapidly changing sociocultural context. A fruitful intermingling of the aesthetic and the theological has developed: an interaction that has opened up new spaces for reflection and still deserves in-depth study today.

This panel welcomes papers that explore how Christian theological trends have influenced Italian prose and poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries, offering a new framework through which these literary forms have been able to redefine themselves. Contributions that focus on one or more of the following subtopics are particularly welcome:

• Augustine and Augustinianism in contemporary Italian literature;
• Forms of mysticism in contemporary Italian literature;
• Apophatic and cataphatic trends in contemporary Italian literature;
• The form of prayer in contemporary Italian literature;
• Influence of modern theology (with a particular interest in Teilhard de Chardin, Balthasar, Barth, and Rahner) on contemporary Italian literature;
• Theology and sociocultural transformation in contemporary Italian literature;
• Feminist theologies and contemporary Italian literature.

Proposals for 20-minute papers (title and abstract of ~200 words) should be submitted through the online platform at the following link: https://secure.onlinecongress.it/onlinecongress/scent/default.aspx?GUID=6206907672521040307087167&language=1.

Specific questions can also be addressed to the chairs, Rebecca Walker (rewalker@tcd.ie) and Lucia Battistel (l.battistel.dottorati@lumsa.it).

The deadline for submitting proposals is 4th April 2025.