2026 ACIS Conference - Keynote Speakers
Associate Professor Jessica Goethals (University of Alabama)
Jessica Goethals is Associate Professor in Italian at the University of Alabama. Her research centres on medieval and early modern literature and theatre, focusing especially on women writers, the relationship between military-historical events and their literary representations across genres, violence, mysticism and prophecy, rhetoric, and spectacle, festival, and performance. She is also interested in transnational and transhistorical approaches to these subjects.
Her monograph Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (University of Toronto Press, 2023) is a full-length study of this remarkable courtesan, professional singer, and prolific author. Together with Sara Díaz, she also edited and translated Costa’s Buffoons, the first comedy published by a woman in Italy.
Currently, she is collaborating with Kate Driscoll on a translation of Costa’s Flora feconda, an epic-turned-libretto about pregnancy. This project is being supported by a UA CARI Fellowship (2024-2026) and by the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities.
A/Prof Goethals is writing a book on the literary repercussions of the 1527 Sack of Rome provisionally entitled The Literary Sack of Rome (1527): Anticipation to Aftermath.
A/Prof Goethals has received long-term and postdoctoral fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Villa I Tatti—the Harvard University Centre for Italian Studies, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University, as well as grants from the Renaissance Society of America, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society.
Professor Clarissa Clò
(San Diego State University)
Clarissa Clò is Professor of Italian, Chair of the Department of Comparative International Studies, and Alumni Association Distinguished Professor at San Diego State University.
Her research includes migration and postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, Italian and Italian American Studies. Her work has appeared in numerous journals: Ácoma, Annali d’Italianistica, California Italian Studies, Diaspora, Forum Italicum, Italian American Review, Italian Culture, Italica, JICMS, and Research in African Literatures.
She has contributed to numerous book collections: The Cultures of Italian Migration, Postcolonial Italy, Italian Political Cinema, Encounters with the Real, Cinema of Exploration, Contemporary Italian Diversity, and Spaghetti Sissies. She edited special issues for Studies in Documentary Film and Il lettore di provincia. She is the editor and co-translator of Amir Issaa’s This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian Hip-Hop Memoir (2023), which received the Premio Internazionale Flaiano di Italianistica “Luca Attanasio” and the MLA Lois Roth Award for Outstanding Translation.
In addition to her academic work at SDSU, Prof Clò collaborates with several Italian American organizations in the community and is on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Italian Film Festival and of the Italian American Academy of San Diego.