Category: News

Together with a theoretical introduction, this volume presents five examples of “Italian/American” fiction writers and poets who live overseas—in our case the United States—and are part of what some have called “Italian literature” of the Italian diaspora. The five writers are representative of this long tradition of writing in Italian in the United States. As Tamburri argues in the first chapter, the notion of the “Italian” writer might benefit from a theoretical-methodological revision that concerns not so much the creative as the critical perspective. One should, as Tamburri states herein, abandon the need for a geographical notion as a decisive point for what is or is not “Italian literature” in order to recognize, to the contrary, the existence of a poly-linguistic aspect of the world of Italian Americans, which has given rise to a remarkably significant literary production in the language of Dante.

Buy the book here.

On Thursday, March 7, Christopher Castellani, author most recently of Leading Men, read from his historical novel about Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo and then was in conversation with Lehman College’s Nicholas Boston about the novel, historical fiction, the figure of the stereotyped Italian American male, gender in fiction-writing, and about Castellani’s feeling that this book, his fourth, is in some sense his debut.

Buy the Leading Men here.

 

 

Fraser M. Ottanelli, of the University of South Florida, presented on February 28 his new, co-authored book, Assassins against the Old Order: Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2018).

The image of the anarchist assassin haunted the popular European imagination in the late nineteenth century. Fear spawned a gross but persistent stereotype: a swarthy “Italian” carrying a bloody knife or revolver and bred to violence by radical politics, madness, innate criminality, and poor genes. The late Nunzio Pernicone and his co-author Fraser M. Ottanelli have dug into the historical, social, cultural, and political conditions behind the phenomenon of anarchist violence in Italy. Looking at political assassinations in the 1890s, they illuminate in this book the public effort to equate anarchy’s goals with violent overthrow.

The Calandra Institute hosted a two-day conference January 17 and 18 on diversity in Italian studies. Participants came from all over the country and abroad to participate. The keynote speech was delivered by Dr. Deborah Parker of the University of Virginia. Topics covered in the several sessions included race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, diversity statistics, and class. This conference focused on a set of issues located at the absolute cutting edge of the philosophy of education, and the presentations were exciting and absorbing. Stay tuned for videos from the sessions, which were Livestreamed and recorded by the Institute and CUNY TV for Italics.

If you are interested in seeing the full program and reading presentation abstracts and finding out more about the presenters, click here.

 

Francesco “Kento” Carlo spoke to Italics host Dean Anthony Tamburri about the influence of local Mafia branch ‘Ndrangheta in Calabrian life throughout history, about being a political rapper, and about the critical importance of rap and music in general in making connections between people when the world is in dire trouble. Francesco recently celebrated the publication of his new book Resistenza Rap, published in English translation by Bordighera Press. Click here to buy the book.

Watch the whole conversation with Francesco on Italics here.

The Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar™ is a three-week summer program that takes place at Roma Tre University from June 17-July 5, 2019. It is designed to introduce participants (doctoral students and professors) to cultural studies of the Italian Diaspora from a variety of academic perspectives and to foster development of individual projects responding to the materials covered in the series of seminars in literature, film, and the social sciences. All participants will engage in a special research project of their choice.

The Seminar is open to graduate students (doctorate; advanced MA students may be considered) and professors from colleges and universities worldwide. This is a collaborative program between the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College of The City University of New York and the Roma Tre University. Professors from these two institutions and others will comprise the teaching faculty of the entire three weeks. This is the fifth year of the Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar.

The program will be accepting up to 20 participants for the 2019 summer program. Application forms can be accessed here.

Fellowships of $1,500 per participant are available.

Cost of room, board (breakfast and lunch), and tuition (12 Roma Tre credit hours): $3,000. Air and ground travel are additional. Click here for the application form and click here for more information on the program schedule and faculty.

Application Deadline—February 22, 2019.

 

Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar Payment

 

Our Italian American Review online content access has just been updated.

NEW! Now read the reviews from the latest issue, 8.2 and the complete contents of 6.2.

Italics: Television for the Italian American Experience aired Tuesday, November 13, with a new episode on the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon. Here in the United States, Ferrante is best known for her New York Times best-selling Neapolitan Quartet of Novels, about two friends growing up in postwar Italy. One of the nation’s most beloved novelists today, Elena Ferrante has garnered great praise both in Italy and in the United States. To discuss this unprecedented cultural event with us are Giancarlo Lombardi, professor and executive officer of the Department of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Rebecca Falkoff, professor of Italian at New York University. Both guests have significant publications on Elena Ferrante. (Taped: 10/16/2018) Click here to watch the episode.

 

If you read or understand Italian, you can get a sense of the tenor of last week’s exciting conference Diaspore Italiane: “Transnationalism & Questions of Identity” from this article in La Voce di New York and by watching the video-taped conversation between Maddalena Tirabassi, Stafano Luconi, and Simone Battiston.

Andrea L. Dottolo, Rhode Island College (left), and Carol Dottolo, retired educator, Liverpool Central School District, New York (right). The mother-daughter research team came to the Institute Thursday, October 25, to present their work on the psychological facets of Syracuse’s Italian American women and their relationships to food.