17 Settembre 2026
International Conference: “Food and Memory: Practices, Narratives, and Afterlives of the Past”
University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo | 17–18 September 2026
How do we remember through food? And what can cooking, eating, flavours, hunger, and conviviality tell us about the ways in which the past continues to inhabit the present?
On 17 and 18 September 2026, the University of Gastronomic Sciences will host the international conference Food and Memory: Practices, Narratives, and Afterlives of the Past, bringing together scholars from different disciplines and leading universities (Yale, Sorbonne, Durham, Duke, Coimbra, and California) to explore food as a privileged site of memory.
Program Overview
Day 1 – Thursday, September 17
8:30
Registration
9:00
Welcome address by President and Rector Prof. Nicola Perullo and conference organizers Prof. Gabriele Proglio and Dr. Claudia Sbuttoni
9:30–11:00
Transnational Italian Food Memories
11:15–12:15
Keynote speaker: Alessandro Portelli
12:30–13:30
Lunch
13:45–15:15
Diaspora, Gender, and Inheritance
15:30–17:00
Food, Displacement, and Belonging
Day 2 – Friday, September 18
09:45–10:30
Food and Holocaust Memory and Embodied Practice and Ritual
10:45–11:45
Keynote speaker: Marianne Hirsch
12:00–13:00
Lunch
13:15–14:45
Food, Empire, and Institutional Memory and Food, War, and Its Afterlives
15:00
Closing remarks