Call for Proposals: Italian Quarterly Special Issue, “Inscribing Voice: Recording and Notation in Twentieth-Century Italy” Call for Submissions Publications

Call for proposals

Inscribing Voice: Recording and Notation in Twentieth-Century Italy

Italian Quarterly – Special Issue

Editors: Isabella Livorni & Milan Reynolds

This special issue offers a new perspective on twentieth-century Italian studies by examining historical and material relationships between voice, recording technologies, and notation practices. We aim to connect recent scholarly work on voice in musicology and Italian studies with sound studies’ emphasis on histories of recording technologies, exploring the distinctly modern relationship between the voice and technologies like the phonograph, magnetic tape, and digital recording. At the same time, we see an opportunity for interdisciplinary theorizations of notation that link literary experiments with form to musical questions of representation. Notation defines the porous boundaries between writing and sound, as well as the hybrid practices of poets, composers, ethnomusicologists, and others who operate across changing media and fields.

We seek contributions that expand historical and material understandings of voice in Italian studies, as it has been shaped by recording technologies and notation methods. Potential topics include:

• Sound and typographic experimentation in literature
• Experimental and electronic music’s use of the voice and technology
• Notation of dialect, orality/aurality, and folk music in Italian ethnographic research
• Italian poetry’s relationship with the voice and recording
• Racialized, gendered, or othered voices and their inscription
• More-than-human voices and hierarchies of listening
• Recording and circulation of Italian popular music and protest song
• Political speech and its connection to inscription
• Vocality in Italian film and the history of dubbing

Please submit a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words by November 30, 2025. In addition, please include a short bio of 300 words or fewer, with your name and affiliation. Publication of accepted articles is projected for early 2027.

Please send abstracts and queries to: isabella.livorni@nyu.edu