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The Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar™ is a three-week summer program that takes place at Roma Tre University. 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 engage in a special research project.

For more information about the program schedule and faculty, contact Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri at 212.642.2094 or via email at anthony.tamburri@qc.cuny.edu.

At the final event of our regularly scheduled programming for the term, Incoronata Inserra presented her book Global Tarantella (University of Illinois Press, 2017), which ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance. Examining tarantella’s changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition.

In this collection of images, photojournalist Martha Cooper, well-known for her work on graffiti and the early days of hip-hop, documents Italian American vernacular expressive culture in 1980s Brooklyn. These thirty-nine photographs were made as part of various documentation projects undertaken by folklorists some three decades ago. Cooper’s photographs of everyday scenes and interactions, many of them involving public Catholic practices in Italian Brooklyn, shine a light on often overlooked details of the urban landscape. Digitized from their original slide formats and newly printed, the photographs depict, among other things, Williamsburg’s annual giglio feast, the Manteo Sicilian marionette theater, yard shrines and sidewalk altars, as well as portraits of community members both noted and lesser-known. This is the first exhibit of Cooper’s extensive earlier Italian American oeuvre.

This exhibition is in collaboration with City Lore, a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to New York City’s vibrant folk arts. City Lore is the repository of Cooper’s extensive slide collection.

On view April 19–August 31, 2018
GALLERY HOURS: MONDAY-FRIDAY, 9AM-5PM
Exhibition Opening: Wednesday, April 18, 20

On February 6, we hosted the following lecture by Ernest Ialongo: “Nation-Building through Antisemitism: Fascist Italy and the Jew as Internal Enemy.” You can now see it on our YouTube Channel.