This seminar proposes to examine Italian and Italian American food studies through the comparative frameworks of transnational circulation, intermedial representation, and cultural translation. Rather than approaching food as a stable marker of heritage or authenticity, the seminar treats it as a mobile signifying practice through which texts, images, commodities, and affects travel across linguistic, national, and medial boundaries. Food thus becomes a privileged comparative object: it links literature to film, advertising to visual culture, and national discourse to diasporic rearticulation.

The seminar invites papers that explore how Italian and Italian American food cultures are narrated, aestheticized, commodified, and contested across literary, cinematic, televisual, and digital forms. Of particular interest are projects that place works, archives, or media formations in relation to one another in order to theorize how “Italian” food is translated across contexts and how those translations produce asymmetries of value, legitimacy, and cultural capital. Such an approach underscores a central concern of comparative literature: the movement of forms, meanings, and imaginaries across borders, alongside the transformations that occur in passage.

Theoretically, the seminar welcomes contributions grounded in food studies, diaspora studies, affect theory, queer theory, translation studies, media theory, postcolonial critique, and the study of racial capitalism. Food may be read here not only as representation, but also as material practice and epistemic structure: a medium through which embodiment, labor, memory, desire, and power become legible. This framing allows participants to ask how culinary discourse organizes identity and difference, how commensality produces or unsettles forms of belonging, and how domestic, commercial, and national narratives intersect in the production of italianità.

The seminar is especially interested in comparative work on themes such as authenticity and simulacra; migration and coloniality; domestic labor and social reproduction; gastronomy and class distinction; queer kinship and alternative temporalities; and the branding of “Made in Italy” in global consumer culture. Papers may address novels, memoirs, cinema, television, cookbooks, food writing, advertisements, social media, or other cultural texts. By bringing Italian and Italian American materials into sustained dialogue, the seminar seeks to show how food serves as a crucial analytic for comparative literary study: one that illuminates mediation, circulation, translation, and the uneven politics of cultural value in a globalized world.