The Institute is currently hosting the exhibition Edward E. Boccia: Postwar American Expressionist, curated by Rosa Berland. The show will be on view until February 21, 2025, and the gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm. Free and open to the public. Click here to see the full catalog of the exhibited works.
Category: News
Simone Cinotto: Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941
Using a decolonizing food-studies approach and unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Cinotto describes the meanings of different foods for different people at various points along the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies, and emotions of Ethiopians and Italians, Gastrofascism and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024) goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences.
Light refreshments will be served.
ILICA Celebrates 20 Years with Conference and Dinner
The Italian Language Inter Cultural Alliance (ILICA) commemorated its twentieth anniversary this weekend with a panel discussion on AI, held at Tribeca 360 in lower Manhattan. Free and open to the public, the conference portion of the event featured representatives from the US and Italy who specialize in a range of endeavors, from academia to medicine to technology and high finance. They gathered to discuss the future of artificial intelligence in their respective fields. The panel consisted of Mr. Francesco Rulli (CEO Querlo), Pierluigi Di Tomassi, Esq. (Di Tomassi Law Firm), Prof. Dean Anthony J. Tamburri (John D. Calandra Italian American Institute), Prof. Dr. Antonio Giordano (Oncologist, Pathologist, Researcher & Environmentalist), and Mr. Alfred (Ted) Douglass IV (The Douglass Group- Merrill Lynch Allentown, PA).
The panel was moderated by Dr. Donna Chirico, president emerita of ILICA.
After the panel and discussion, Vincenzo Marra, chairman and founder of ILICA, played host to assembled guests for a lavish dinner including musical accompaniment by Matteo Fedeli and Antonio Scaioli.
Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri Receives Special Award at IASA Conference
At the annual conference of the Italian American Studies Association in Boca Raton, Florida, this past weekend, Calandra’s dean, Anthony Tamburri, was presented with the IASA’s 2024 Distinguished Service Award. “The most important feature of Anthony’s sense of the word service is one that comprehends all,” said IASA’s former president Alan Gravano. “Anthony serves his colleagues because he enjoys the success of others as his own. He loves to provide ways for others to succeed. He creates venues and means for others to shine. … You could not find one person in our field who has not been helped or motivated to become a better scholar by Anthony Tamburri.” Gravano, along with Dr. Ilaria Serra, presented the award. Congratulations to Dean Tamburri.
Calandra Chosen as NYC Launch Site for Italea Initiative
On Thursday, October 10, a slew of Italian dignitaries gathered at the Calandra Institute to toast a roots-travel initiative by Italea. From the Italea website:
Italea is the program to promote roots tourism, launched by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation within the NRRP project and financed by NextGenerationEU.
The project aims to attract Italians abroad and Italian descendants intending to discover the places and traditions of their origins, providing a set of services to facilitate travel in Italy, thanks also to the widespread organization of 20 groups, one in each Italian region, who will take care of informing, welcoming and assisting travelers from their roots.
Italea is a project dedicated both to those who already know their Italian origins and want to organize a trip to discover and rediscover the places, customs and culture of their ancestors, and to those who need to identify them, and who will be able to make use of a network of reliable genealogists.
The name Italea derives from “talea,” a practice by which a plant is allowed to propagate. By cutting a part of it and replanting it, it can be given new life, making new roots grow: just as happens with migrations. This program represents gratitude to the “mother plant” for its flowering in the world.
Photograph of Calandra Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri and Cons. Amb. Giovanni Maria de Vita courtesy of Catalina Santamaria
Calandra’s Joseph Sciorra on Pete Panto, at Casa Italiana
Last week, Calandra’s Dr. Joseph Sciorra delivered a talk at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò on the topic of labor activist Pietro “Pete” Panto. Sciorra spearheaded a successful effort last year to have Panto’s headstone made and installed in St. John’s Cemetery on Long Island, where the longshoreman’s remains are buried.
Click here to watch the entire presentation at Casa Italiana.
Seeking Objects Made by Italian POWs in the United States
In April 2025 the Calandra Institute will mount an exhibit on the artistry of World War II Italian POWs in the United States. The exhibit will feature handcrafted objects, paintings, photographs, letters, newspapers, and other artifacts documenting creativity under captivity. During the war more than 51,000 Italian military personnel were held throughout the country, from Massachusetts to Hawaii. The curators, Laura E. Ruberto (Berkeley City College) and Joseph Sciorra (Calandra Institute), are looking for items, especially crafts and artwork, for possible inclusion in the exhibit. While the exhibit will focus on the United States, objects from other parts of the world concerning Italian POWs are also of interest. Such artwork may have been made while in a POW camp or after the war as a reflection of wartime captivity and experience. The exhibit is co-sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY), the Australian Research Council, and the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships.
Please contact both Dr. Ruberto (lruberto@peralta.edu) and Dr. Sciorra (joseph.sciorra@qc.cuny.edu) directly with any leads, examples of artifacts, or questions.
Calandra Institute’s Dr. Joseph Sciorra Wins Bishir Prize
The Vernacular Architecture Forum has awarded Joseph Sciorra its 2024 Catherine W. Bishir Prize for his article “‘The Strange Artistic Genius of This People’: The Ephemeral Art and Impermanent Architecture of Italian Immigrant Catholic Feste,” published in the Fall/Spring 2023 issue of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.
Sciorra looks at late nineteenth and early twentieth-century mobile shrines and street chapels—Baroque confections as tall as sixty feet or as wide as buildings, shaped like altars, towers, or even land-faring boats. Italian American craftsmen created these for their immigrant community feste, or—as Sciorra calls them—“cultural-religious extravaganzas.” He shows the reader these works through the eyes of their intended audiences, as well as those of outsiders—photographers, journalists, visual artists—whose potential biases he carefully considers. Sciorra examines, “how these transient objects of devotion … enacted and proclaimed a diasporic community of believers that challenged hegemonic notions of artistry, religion, the built environment, and the public sphere.” He further expands his gaze to contextualize his hand-crafted sources of study as, in his words, “part of the Progressive era’s xenophobic climate and, in particular, the picturesque gaze that racialized and othered Italian immigrants.”
An online copy of the article is accessible here.
IDSSS: A Glowing Report
The latest image from the 2024 edition of the Italian Diaspora Summer Studies Seminar at Roma Tre University. The program ends June 28, 2024.
Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar in the News
The IDSSS got some favorable press in L’idea magazine. This year’s edition of the seminar ran through June 28 at Roma Tre University.