[URBANTH-L]CFP: Polis and Politics: Italian Urbanism under Fascism

[Angela Jancius]

"Polis and Politics: Italian Urbanism under Fascism"
Columbia University in the City of New York
April 27 and 28, 2007

Deadline: December 15, 2006

In Fascist Italy the urban environment served as a critical cultural 
reference from which artists, architects, politicians, and planners sought 
to fashion a new Italy. This conference asks the question of why the city 
exerted such a powerful influence over contemporary artistic practice and 
what were the consequences. While scholars have documented many of the major 
urban interventions in cities such as Rome and considerable attention has 
been given to the new towns founded by Mussolini, recently historians have 
begun to look at other models and examples that enrich and complicate our 
understanding of Fascism's interest in cities and towns.

We invite papers dealing with a broad range of concerns, such as colonial 
town planning, the fabrication of collective memory through monuments, 
ideologically selective archaeology and preservation, the Italian 
translation of CIAM principles, and the intensely politicized nature of 
urban interventions in the period of Fascist rule. We encourage papers from 
the broad range of disciplines that have contributed to modern Italian 
architectural history, including anthropology, geography, history and 
literary criticism.
To be considered, please submit an abstract (300 words, maximum) and a brief 
c.v. by December 15, 2006 to Andrew Manson at ajm56 at columbia.edu. Complete 
papers will be due in March 2007, and are expected to be approximately 25 
minutes in length. Graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and junior 
faculty are particularly encouraged to apply. The conference is co-sponsored 
by the Department of Art History, the Graduate School of Architecture, 
Planning and Preservation, and the Italian Academy.

Andrew Manson
Department of Att History and Archaeology
Columbia University
Email: ajm56 at columbia.edu