About Us

The Canadian Association for Italian Studies is an international organization composed mainly of academics, although a good number of our members come from outside the university. Our constitution states that membership to our Association is open to all those who have a scholarly or professional interest in Italian Studies.

Established in 1972, our Association aims to foster and advance Italian Studies in Canada by providing venues for the presentation and discussion of research dealing with Italian language, literature, film, politics and culture, and related fields, such as Italian-Canadian studies, and matters pertaining to the teaching of Italian as a second and third language.

We hold two conferences yearly: in the spring in conjunction with the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences; in the fall at a site determined by the executive of the association. At both conferences we meet to exchange the results of our research: the spring conference is generally devoted to literature and related disciplines while the fall conference usually focuses on issues of pedagogy. In the last few years, we have been moving towards topics of greater interdisciplinary scope. We have also increased our collaboration with other associations (we have organized joint sessions at our spring conference with the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, and with the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies and the Canadian Association of Hispanists, and we have participated in the conferences of the American Association of Teachers of Italian held in Chianciano, Crotone and Toronto). In the future, we plan to expand the interdisciplinary range of our conferences even further and to embark on more joint projects with sister societies.

Our society publishes a refereed semi-annual journal, Quaderni d'italianistica, which enjoys an excellent reputation and is distributed to the members of the Society and also to individual and institutional subscribers. Quaderni d’italianistica is a peer-reviewed journal. It appears twice yearly and publishes in English, French, and Italian. Publication is made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.