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Performing Embodiment: Choreographies of Affect, Language, and Social Norms Ed. by Alberica Bazzoni and Federica Buongiorno
Combining the notions of performativity and embodiment, this book situates the body in the realm of processes, movement, and poiesis, seeking to generate alternative configurations to mind–body dualism. Focused on language, literature, dance, affect, gender, sport, and disability, the contributions to this volume emphasize doing over being: the body does and is done; it is engaged in a movement of co-constitution with the world. It is in doing that bodies produce knowledge and shared or contested social meaning. Such a relational process is best described through the notion of choreographies — patterns of movement which capture the embodied dynamic of passivity and activity, design and improvisation, inner and outer states, and which fittingly describe the modalities through which social norms discipline bodies, or are challenged by them.
2026 | Cultural Inquiry, 39 | 45 € (hc) | 16.50 € (pb)
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Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer
Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 24 | 29 € (hc) | 14 € (pb)
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Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue
Presentation and discussion of the latest ICI Berlin Press publication by Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue (2020). 

The seminar Lirica&Teoria brings together a group of scholars based in different countries to discuss questions of lyric theory as well as new approaches to the lyric, with a particular focus on the Italian poetic tradition. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the seminar will also host events open to the public and related to Dante’s lyric poetry.

Forthcoming on 28 May 2021, 17:00 CET, in Italian and German

Judith Kasper (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Andrea Renker (Universität Konstanz) and Fabien Vitali (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) present and discuss with the audience their translation project: Le Rime di Dante in tedesco
2021