Professor Awarded SSHRCC Grant for New Italian Thought Conference

King’s University College congratulates Dr. Antonio Calcagno who has received the 2016 Connections Grant of $13,946 given by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) for his “New Italian Thought – Challenges and Responses” conference. The connections grant supports various activities, including workshops, forums and conferences that represent opportunities for scholarly exchange, knowledge-building, and research dissemination. Dr. Calcagno’s rationale for the award focused on how the conference contributes to the development of original research, the practical application of new ideas and modes of thinking to issues in economics, politics, metaphysics, sociology, aesthetics, feminism and philosophy; and on the mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. The grant highlights the potential impact of the conference’s keynote speakers. Dr. Calcagno says, “At the moment, there is an explosion of new philosophy on the Italian peninsula. We have access to some of it in translation, but we can’t keep up with the speed of developments. To bring Franco Berardi, Elena Pulcini and Remo Bodei to campus would give Canadians and more specifically, people at King’s and Western, access to some leading figures in this latest phase of philosophy’s development.”

The conference will take place at King’s from March 24 to 26, 2017 in the King Student Life Centre. It will feature three keynote speakers, Franco Berardi (Accademia di Brere, Milan), Elena Pulcini (University of Florence), and Remo Bodei (UCLA). The conference also includes a line-up of presenters who are a mix of graduate students and scholars from all over the world. “They will be talking about the legacy of the new work in Italian philosophy and will create an exchange of the ideas,” Dr. Calcagno says. The conference is open to all and students from Western and King’s are strongly encouraged to attend.

To learn more about philosophy at King’s, click here.