The Dipartimento of Studi Linguistici e Letterari (DiSLL) of the Università di Padova, together with the research group on travel writing of the European Society of Comparative Literature and the Centro Studi ‘Arti della Modernità’, is organising an International Conference on Borderscapes: Figures of Crossing in Contemporary Travel Writing to be held in Padua on 27-29 January 2027. The conference will address, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the forms and codes of borders, exploring their cultural, historical and social meanings. The discussion will focus on the symbolic uses that have made this literary motif a tool for reflecting both on the power dynamics implicit in intercultural relations and on the thresholds (between truth and fiction, verbal and visual, representation and place) specific to a complex genre such as travel writing.

International Conference - BORDERSCAPES - Figures of Crossing in Contemporary Travel Writing - Università di Padova, 27-29/1/2027 – Padova (Italy)

Argument

In giving visible form to the “crisis of cartographic reason” (Farinelli 2009), the notion of border has become a central concept of the contemporary spatial turn (Guglielmi, Pala 2011), for disciplines such as geography (Winders, Johnson, Schein 2016), cultural anthropology (Wilson 2023), philosophy (Cooper, Tinning 2019), literary theory (Youngs 2019), and political studies (Konrad, Amilhat Szary 2023), emerging as an autonomous field of study.

Borders have come to be understood not only as an element of separation, but also as autonomous spaces—“borderlands” (Anzaldúa 1987), “contact zones” (Pratt 1991), or “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994)—useful for renegotiating forms of representation of cultural diversity. Forty years after the publication of Anzaldúa’s book, this conference aims to reflect on the legacy of those studies, in a society that appears increasingly marked both by the acceleration of forms of mobility that erode borders and nonetheless by the persistence of closed frontiers, obstacles to movement, and forms of segregation (Aime, Papotti 2023). In shifting beyond cartographic space, the presence of borders has not diminished; on the contrary, it has multiplied today as a “method” of the economic and social organisation of advanced capitalism (Mezzadra-Neilson 2013).

As a “transnational” and “translational” (Apter 2005) textual space, travel writing, in this context, appears to be the ideal object for exploring the symbolic order of the notion of border, together with its aesthetic issues, such as the representation of crossing, the trauma of disorientation, the exotic imagination, the transit zones, the figures of intermediation, and the codes of translation. Contemporary travel writing—from Ella Maillart to Nicolas Bouvier, from William Least Heat-Moon to Gloria Anzaldúa, from Claudio Magris to Paolo Rumiz, from Ryszard Kapuściński to Kapka Kassabova, from Caryl Phillips to Teju Cole, from W.G. Sebald to Robert Macfarlane—has often made the theme of borders (in all their semantic depth, as frontier, limit, margin, threshold) its true destination. It is no coincidence that Mathias Énard (2024) has recently spoken of the “melancholy of borders”, referring to the contemporary loss of the sense of disorientation and distance depicted in travel writing.

The “mobility turn” (Urry 2007) has led to the inclusion of various types of movement—such as tourism, migration, commuting, urban exploration and nature walking—in this genre of writing. Today the representation of travel serves as a testing ground for proposals from different research perspectives, such as postcolonial studies (Clarke 2018), gender studies (Bird 2012), translation studies (Polezzi 2016), and media studies (Korte, Sennefelder 2022). In geocritical terms (Westphal 2007), the image of borders—and its transgression—appears as a decisive tool for reflecting, meta-artistically, on the deterritorialisation of the traditional oppositions associated with travel (such as home/abroad, near/far, slowness/speed, familiar/exotic), whose demarcations appear deeply changed and difficult to trace.

The Dipartimento of Studi Linguistici e Letterari (DiSLL) of the Università di Padova, together with the research group on travel writing of the European Society of Comparative Literature and the Centro Studi ‘Arti della Modernità’, is organising an International Conference on Borderscapes: Figures of Crossing in Contemporary Travel Writing to be held in Padua on 27-29 January 2027. The conference will address, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the forms and codes of borders, exploring their cultural, historical and social meanings. The discussion will focus on the symbolic uses that have made this literary motif a tool for reflecting both on the power dynamics implicit in intercultural relations and on the thresholds (between truth and fiction, verbal and visual, representation and place) specific to a complex genre such as travel writing.

The conference advisory board will consider proposals for papers on the following topics, both on a theoretical and empirical level:

• the evolution of the notions of borderlands and contact zone, from their formulation to the present day, and their possible use in the study of travel writing;
• the border as an historical and anthropological concept, and travel writing as a space of cultural mediation, or “in-between,” as opposed to the rhetoric of “us and them”;
• the boundaries of travel writing as a genre, and its possible hybridisations with other areas of writing (memoir, place description, narrative, reportage);
• the relationship between translation studies and travel writing studies, with a focus on different cases of linguistic crossing, extraterritoriality and multilingualism;
• figures and themes of liminality in writings relating to various forms of contemporary mobility (tourism, migration, etc.);
• the motifs of thresholds and liminality in writings of urban exploration and psychogeography, in their relations to the aesthetics of disappearance;
• the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in travel writing and their possible hybridisation, with fictional and non-fictional elements in opposing contexts;
• the forms of intermedial interaction in travel writing, with reference to paratextual thresholds and semiotics crossing in geophototexts and other mixed genres;
• the redefinition of the boundary between natural and artificial in travel writing, from an ecocritical perspective.

Submission guidelines

Proposals of about 250 words may be submitted to borderscapes.padua2027@gmail.com,

by 31 August 2026,

together with a bio-bibliographical profile. Proposals will be read and evaluated by 15 September 2026. The time of delivery for each paper should be no more than 20 minutes. Registration fee for participants: 70 euros; post-doc fellows and PhDs: 40 euros. The conference languages will be English, French and Italian. 

Selected presentations will be considered for publication in peer-reviewed journals such as «Cosmo: Comparative Studies in Modernism» (ISSN 2281-6658).

Advisory Board

• Luis Alburquerque (CSIC, Madrid)
• Franca Bruera (Università di Torino)
• Emilia Di Rocco (Università di Roma La Sapienza)
• Giuliana Ferreccio (Università di Torino)
• Federica Frediani (USI, Lugano)
• Roberto Gilodi (Università di Torino)
• Chiara Mengozzi (Karlova Univerzita, Praha)
• Davide Papotti (Università di Parma)
• Javier Alonso Prieto (Universidad de Valladolid)
• Sylvie Requemora (Aix-Marseille)
• Sandra Vlasta (Università di Genova)
• Zsuzsanna Varga (University of Glasgow)

Convernors

• Luigi Marfè (Università di Padova)
• Francesca Dainese (Università di Padova)
• Matteo Giancotti (Università di Padova)
• Alessandro Metlica (Università di Padova)
• Marika Piva (Università di Padova)
• Enrico Zucchi (Università di Padova)

Opening Lecture

• Mathias Énard

Keynote Speakers

• Marco Aime (Università di Genova)
• Sylvie Requemora (Université Aix-Marseille)
• Zsuzsanna Varga (University of Glasgow)
• Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University) 

References   

Aime, M., Papotti, D. 2012. L’altro e l’altrove. Antropologia, geografia e turismo. Torino: Einaudi.

Aime, M., Papotti, D. 2023. Confini. Realtà e invenzioni. Torino: Edizioni Gruppo Abele.

Anzaldúa, G. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

Apter, E. 2005. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Balibar É. 1994. “Qu’est-ce qu’une frontière?” In M.C. Caloz-Tschopp, A. Clevenot (éds.), Asile, violence, exclusion en Europe. Histoire, analyse, prospective. Genève: Université de Genève, 335–43.

Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Bird, D. 2012. Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women’s Oriental Travelogues, 1850-1950. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Clarke, R. 2018. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Cooper, A., Tinning, S. 2019 (eds.). Debating and Defining Borders Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

Das, N., Youngs, T. (eds.). 2019. The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Din-Kariuki, N., Van Meersbergen, G. (eds.) 2024. “Travel Studies and the Decolonial Turn.” Studies in Travel Writing 2/27.

Eilittä, L., Vlasta, S. (eds.) 2021. “Travel Writing, Cultural Exchange and Identity Construction / Récits de voyage, échanges culturels et constructions identitaires.” Complit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society 2/2.

Énard, M. 2024. Mélancolie des confins. Arles: Actes Sud.

Farinelli, F. 2009. La crisi della ragione cartografica. Torino: Einaudi.

Forsdick, C., Kinsley, Z., Walchester, K. (eds.). 2019. Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary. London: Anthem Press.

Guglielmi, M., Pala, M. (eds.). 2011. Frontiere, confini, limiti. Roma: Armando.

Huggan, G. 2009. Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP.

Johnson, N.C., Schein, R.H., Winders, J. (eds.). 2016. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. London: Blackwell.

Konrad, V., Amilhat Szary, A.L. 2023. Border Culture Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics. New York: Routledge.

Korte, B., Sennefelder, A.K. (eds.). 2022. Travel, Writing and the Media: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Mezzadra S, Neilson B. 2013. Border as Method, or The Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke UP.

Pettinger, A., Youngs, T. (eds.). 2020. The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing. London: Routledge.

Polezzi, L. (ed.). 2016. “Translation, Travel, Migration.” The Translator 12/2 (special issue).

Pratt, M.L. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991, 33–40.

Pratt, M.L. 2018. “Afterword.” In R. Clarke (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 217–230.

Sójka, P. 2022. Writing Travel, Writing Life. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.

Thompson, C. (ed.). 2015. The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing. London: Routledge.

Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Vlasta, S. 2012. Contemporary Migration Literature in German and English. Amsterdam: Brill-Rodopi.

Westphal, B. 2007. La Géocritique, Réel, Fiction, Espace. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Wilson, T.M. 2023. Borders, Boundaries, Frontiers: Anthropological Insights. Toronto UP.

Youngs, T. 2019. “Borders.” In C. Forsdick, Z. Kinsley, K. Walchester (eds.). 2019. Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary. London: Anthem Press, 25–28.