The history of education in Italy provides the focus of the Annual ASMI conference 2015. We are interested in papers which will contribute towards weaving the narrative of Italy’s educational pathway by embracing a variety of perspectives on education, both formal and informal, within Italy and beyond, including the connected histories which crossed the nation’s geographical boundary during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discipline of history of education has expanded widely in the last few decades. Not only have scholars been exploring the history of pedagogy, national school systems, curriculums, institutions, teachers and the history of textbooks, but also the trajectories of informal education. This has included research on youth clubs, scouts and military organisations, historical pageants, cinema, television, art and architecture and forms of organised memory, through museums and official memorials. The conference plans to reflect this broad perspective. Scholars from
disciplines, including Italian studies, film, media and communication studies, literature studies, cultural studies, politics, pedagogy and history, are invited to contribute papers.
The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from different disciplines to analyse the forms which contributed to the civil, political, intellectual education of the Italians. The conference welcomes (but is not limited to) approaches which focus on the history of educating the Italians not only as an inward-looking process, on the construction of italianità, but as an endeavour which rested on cultural encounters, ideological exchanges and comparative studies which may be read in the context of the ‘transnational turn’.

Possible topics include:
1. Education, religion and ideology
2. Education in making Italians and the national character
3. Women’s education in the 19th and 20th centuries
4. Educating the nation at war
5. The adult education movement in Italy
6. Education in the colonies or the diaspora
7. Questions of bilinguism, including border regions
8. Regional and national identities
9. Transnational networks of scholars
10. The media and education
11. Historiographical perspectives

Keynote speakers: John Davis (University of Connecticut) and Mario Isnenghi (Ca’ Foscari).

Conference Organizers: Dr Claudia Baldoli (Newcastle University), Dr Marcella P. Sutcliffe, University of Cambridge/ Institute of Education (UCL); Maria Patricia Williams (Institute of Education (UCL).

Please send proposals of a maximum of 250 words and information about your institutional affiliation and status (100 words) by 15 July 2015 to educatingitaly@gmail.com
All those presenting a paper at the conference will be required to join ASMI and register for the conference by 1 November 2015.