This seventh edition of the Umbra Institute’s biennial Food Conference entitled, “Ecologies of Food”, will be held from June 11-14, 2026, in Perugia, Italy.
The Keynote speaker will be Serenella Iovino, the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor in Humanities; a Professor of Italian Studies & Environmental Humanities; and an
Affiliated Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Humanities from the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo B0, in co-affiliation with the University of Padua, in 2018.
Serenella Iovino’s research approach has a strong interdisciplinary and transnational orientation. Her work is internationally recognized in the fields of environmental humanities and ecocriticism, research areas to which she has contributed essays and volumes on such topics as environmental ethics, ecocritical theory, cultural landscapes, critical animal studies, biosemiotics, posthumanism, feminist ecocriticism, Mediterranean studies, new materialisms, environmental justice, land art, bioregionalism and place ethics, and a number of studies bringing Italy and Italian literature and culture into the foreground. She also investigated the relationships among philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences in XVIII-XIX-century Germany in essays and two book-length publications on the Age of Goethe.
In Italian Studies, her main areas of specialization are 20th-21st century Italian literature, culture, and environmental issues (from cultural landscapes to issues of political ecology and justice). While her main research interest are broader environmental constellations such as landscapes and human-animal relationships, Serenella has also dedicated essays and articles to Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anna Maria Ortese, Laura Conti, Gianni Celati, and examined contemporary artistic and filmic subjects.
She is author and editor of twelve volumes and over a hundred and fifty essays and articles. Her most recent publications are Gli animali di Calvino: Storie dall’Antropocene (Treccani, 2023, 1st ed. Italo Calvino’s Animals: Anthropocene Stories, Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Paesaggio civile: Storie di ambiente, cultura e resistenza (Il Saggiatore, 2022, 1st ed. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, Bloomsbury, 2016, winner of the MLA Prize and American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize).
A philosopher by training and a public intellectual, she is a columnist of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica and a regular feature of the magazine Maremosso (Feltrinelli editore).
