AIZEN/UNIVERSITY OF MAIA, PORTUGAL CONFERENCE
The most recent conference, which Juliana Starr organized with Célia Vieira at the University of Maia, in Maia, Portugal, once again highlighted the AIZEN’s ability to foster a global community of scholars devoted to researching and promoting naturalism. Our Association’s twentieth international conference was titled “Émile Zola, Naturalism, and Progress,” and took place on June 26-28, 2025 in the beautiful Main Building on the verdant campus of the University of Maia, located just ten miles from the historic center of Porto.
From left: Juliana Starr and Célia Vieira, organizers-in-chief of the conference
During Zola’s lifetime, the city of Porto became a major cultural, artistic, and financial center, and an important diffuser of naturalism, as evidenced by its numerous publishing houses producing works by Beldemónio, Portugal’s most prolific translator of Zola, as well as novels by Lusophone naturalists such as Eça de Queirós. Today, two of the city’s most spectacular bridges stand as symbols of progress. Porto’s landscape features the Maria Pia Bridge (1877), attributed to Gustave Eiffel, and the Dom Luís I Bridge, a double-deck metal arch designed by one of his students, alongside the monumental 19th-century Palácio da Bolsa, built to impress international investors. Likewise, Maia—home to a modern subway system and northern Portugal’s only international airport—has experienced remarkable development in the 20th and 21st centuries and now ranks among the Porto metropolitan area’s leading industrial and technological hubs. In this context, the AIZEN 2025 conference celebrated naturalism’s commitment to cultural, social, and scientific progress.
Dom Luis 1 Bridge
After choosing the theme of the conference, world events only made the work of naturalist writers and artists more relevant. We saw significant global progress in renewable energy, medical breakthroughs, and international environmental treaties. These advances occurred amid a turbulent geopolitical landscape marked by ongoing conflicts like the war in Ukraine and political shifts. In addition to the sessions explicitly devoted to Zolian fiction and naturalism, many addressed topics closely tied to the conference theme of progress. Others explored naturalism across the arts. Several sessions took an international perspective, focusing on American, Belgian, Brazilian, Finnish, and Portuguese writers. Other contributions examined the diffusion of naturalism through issues such as translation, copyright, and censorship while others investigated its intersections with gender studies, feminism, immigration, philosophy, racism, science, and transportation.
Professor José Ferreira Gomes, Rector of the University of Maia
Conference audience
We are proud to have collaborated with the department of communication and information sciences and technologies in a highly regarded and leading Portuguese university such as the University of Maia.
University of Maia, Portugal
The exceptional character of this conference was also a result of the performance of our Honored Guest, the singer Cláudia Madur, accompanied by her musicians. Together they make up the Destino Fado Musical Project, treating the conference-goers to a live concert of Fado, a distinctly Portuguese musical genre popularized by the great Amália Rodrigues.
Destino Fado: Cláudia Madur and her musicians
We also had the pleasure of welcoming two invited speakers: Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London (England), and Ana Clara Santos, Professor of French and Portuguese Literature at the Université de l’Algarve (CIAC/FCHS, Portugal). The conference also benefited from the presence of our guest, Professor Marie-Christine Pais-Simon of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, a specialist in both French and Portuguese literatures, who spoke about the links between Eça de Queirós and Zola. The AIZEN warmly thanks all of them for their participation in the 2025 conference.
Dan Rebellato
Ana Clara Santos
Marie-Christine Pais Simon
This symposium, through the richness of its content and its highly international dimension, honored the University of Maia by bringing to its doors (and to its screens via Teams) talented participants from four continents and seventeen different countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland, and the United States.
AIZEN family portrait, Main Hall of the Main Building, University of Maia, Portugal