Italian American Studies Undergraduate and Graduate Programs at Queens College, CUNY
Over the past one-hundred-and forty years millions of Italians have come to the United States, helping to shape the development of the nation in innumerable ways. Italian American experiences are rich and storied, providing research material in fields as diverse as sociology, history, linguistics, economics, musicology, folklore, demographics, media studies, art history, psychology, and political science, among others. It is the exploration of all these areas of study, as well as the exponential ways in which they combine and change one another, to which the Calandra Institute is devoted.
With initiatives on both the local and international levels, the Institute seeks to expand this exploration. It has inaugurated programs in Italy of Italian American studies and co-hosted interdisciplinary conferences in Australia, Italy, and the United States. In March 2014, the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, hosted a three-day workshop on Italian/American Studies in both Italian and American universities. From that workshop, the Italian American Studies Network (IASN) was born.
Calandra has entered into historic partnerships with Italian universities all over the peninsula to create research forums for students in both the United States and Italy to pursue courses related to immigration, Italian American culture, food studies, and cinema studies. It has also created a masters program in Italian American Studies at CUNY and is working to find a home for developing a PhD program.
Staff members, most notably to date Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri, Distinguished Prof. Fred Gardaphé, and Dr. Joseph Sciorra, contribute regularly to literature in the field with their individual and collaborative publications.