We are looking for contributions for an edited volume, to be published as part of the new Italian Thought book series at De Gruyter:

Reading Gramsci Today: New Perspectives Between Postcolonial and Gender Studies

Edited by Saskia Kroonenberg & Chiara Meta

On the 8th of November 2026, it is exactly 100 years ago that Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was arrested by the Fascist regime. His thoughts were considered so threatening, that at the trial, it was said that his brain had to be stopped from working for the next 20 years. As the posthumous publication of his Prison Notebooks and other writings show, Gramsci’s brain did not stop functioning at all. At present, one century later, his thoughts are as relevant as ever. This edited volume therefore proposes to read Gramsci today, specifically, by readdressing Gramsci’s legacy and current relevance from a perspective of postcolonial and gender studies.

Over the last decades, from the 1980s onwards, Gramsci’s thoughts have been widely influential in these fields, introducing notions of hegemony, subalternity and the organic intellectual as elaborated by Raewyn Connell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Subaltern Studies Group and Edward W. Said, amongst others. What do these notions mean today? Did their meaning change? What other Gramscian notions have been overlooked? Are there new ways to productively read Gramsci again?

Besides ‘translating’ Gramscian thought to the present, this edited volume also aims to offer a bridge between an Anglophone audience and Italian and other studies of Gramsci, which offer innovative readings of his words. Especially in Anglophone scholarship, many studies of Gramsci have relied on quite selective editions and translations of his thoughts, which do not always fully correspond to his actual writings: for example, the complete translation into English of his Notebook 25 on the history of subaltern social groups was published as recently as 2021. This means that more precise readings of large parts of his work only recently became possible in English and it highlights the relevance of studying scholars from other linguistic contexts (Italian, but also Spanish, Portoghese and others) with access to Gramsci’s words. We thus also strongly invite authors from non-Anglophone contexts, including the global south, who wish to share their perspective on Gramsci with an Anglophone audience.

We invite contributions from a variety of fields that engage with postcolonial and gender studies, including literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, philosophy, archeology, pedagogy, anthropology, as well as environmental and digital humanities. As mentioned, we are interested in contributions that underline Gramsci’s contemporary relevance and that explore understudied aspects or interpretations of his thinking (see below for examples).

We welcome proposals for contributions on the following themes:

  • contemporary relevance and readings of ‘classic’ Gramscian notions such as subalternity, hegemony, or organic intellectuals;
  • contemporary relevance and usages of understudied notions such as the molecular, subject formation as a collective-individual process, conformism, folklore, common and good sense, the relation between nature and culture, reflections on technology, epistemological questions, historical determinism, etc.;
  • the future of Gramscian scholarship in relation to postcolonial and gender studies.

Planned timeline

Deadline abstracts: 8 November 2026

Notification of selection: 17 November 2026

Submission full chapter: 17 March 2027

We are very much looking forward to receiving your abstract (150-200 words) and a short bio as a pdf file, to be sent to saskia.kroonenberg@ru.nl.