[Letizia Modena]

Call for Papers – Roundtable Proposal; 2026 NeMLA Convention, March 5-8, Pittsburgh, PA .

Narrating Renewal: Literary, Visual, and Physical Cultures of Urban Regeneration

This roundtable explores how urban regeneration is represented, shaped, and critiqued through literature, film, photography, and physical practice. It invites interdisciplinary proposals examining the symbolic, social, and physical dimensions of urban change. Topics may include artistic responses to displacement, spatial justice, and the politics of memory and belonging. Proposals may focus on representations or case studies of regeneration and its social impact.

Full description:

In 2026, the NeMLA Convention’s keyword will be (Re)generation. In our current cultural and political moment, it is virtually impossible to escape the vocabulary and rhetoric of urban regeneration. Thanks to media coverage and the ubiquity of social discourse, terms like renewing, transforming, converting, rebuilding, redeveloping, reviving, repurposing, and revitalizing have become central to how we understand our cities. These terms reflect an evolving urban imaginary: one in which the city is viewed as organic, dynamic, and endlessly transformable.

As humanities scholars, we are particularly attuned to how such transformations are more than infrastructural—they are deeply symbolic and ideological. Regeneration narratives often mobilize discourses of creativity, progress, and renewal while simultaneously raising critical questions about class, identity, memory, and power. Urban regeneration reshapes not only the physical landscape but also the way that space is imagined, represented, and inhabited. Places become unfamiliar, infused with layers of loss and opportunity—”improved” or “worsened” depending on one’s perspective and positionality.

Peter Roberts and Hugh Sykes, in their handbook Urban Regeneration (2000), define the concept as a wide-ranging vision and set of actions that seek to address economic, social, environmental, and physical challenges of declining urban areas. Yet, such definitions do not fully account for the cultural, symbolic, and emotional dimensions of regeneration—dimensions where the humanities offer essential insight. In this context, the arts—literature, film, photography, and beyond—are not passive observers but active participants in the reimagining of urban space. They provide forms of psychological and social commentary that anticipate, accompany, and respond to these urban changes and their impact on both the collective dimension and individuals. They register transformation, memorialize disappearance, envision alternatives, and often challenge dominant narratives of who belongs, who benefits, and who is displaced. These creative expressions become a reasoned archive and a space for critique, offering textured readings of regeneration as both opportunity and erasure.

This roundtable invites proposals that engage with the following themes:

• Representations of urban regeneration in literature, cinema, and photography, i.e. artistic narratives registering, resisting, or reframing urban change;
• The role of the arts in shaping narratives of urban regeneration; culture as a catalyst in urban renewal;
• Case studies of regeneration strategies in Italian cities and their social/cultural implications;
• Written or visual urban narratives exploring the relationship between individuals and changing physical/social landscapes: whose stories are centered or erased in the renewal process?
• Urban imaginaries, physical urban metamorphoses and the politics of memory and belonging;
• Narratives of displacement or return, spatial justice, and resistance in regenerated or redeveloped environments;
• Literary or visual intersectional explorations of urban regeneration/degeneration: class, race, gender, age, sexuality, and religion.

Please send 200-300 word abstracts to Letizia.modena@vanderbilt.edu by September 30, 2025.

Thank you,

Letizia Modena

Vanderbilt University

 

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