03/07/2026 15:00 - 17:10

HALL: Pola - A206b

Contact: Ruozzi F.

Chair: Perin R.

In recent decades, audiovisual archives—films, television news, documentaries, radio recordings, and, more recently, born-digital materials (recent popes, for example, have social media accounts)—have become indispensable sources for the history of the Church. These materials not only document events, figures, and ecclesial practices, but also actively contribute to shaping the religious imaginary, forms of ecclesial communication, and the ways in which Catholicism has represented itself in the global public sphere.
This open panel seeks to host and present research that proposes a methodological rethinking of the relationship between Church history and media, critically interrogating the traditional categories of religious historiography in light of the visual and media cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through case studies ranging from the mediatization of major ecclesial events (councils, jubilees, conclaves, papal journeys) to film and television production, and including presentations of new digital libraries dedicated to collecting audiovisual sources concerning the Italian Church, the panel aims to be a space for reflection on how moving images have transformed both the ways of making, narrating, and transmitting Church history and the ways of studying it—placing new sources on the historian's workbench.
By adopting interdisciplinary approaches that weave together religious history, social and political history, media studies, and cinema and television studies, the panel seeks to bring together scholars that innovatively draw on audiovisual sources for the study of contemporary history. Audiovisual archives are not merely documentary repositories but historical actors that participate in the shaping of contemporary Catholic cultures.