Tag: calandra

The Columbus Affair: Imperatives for an Italian/American Agenda

At Stony Brook University’s Center for Italian Studies, Calandra’s dean, Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, will be in conversation with the Center’s Director Giuseppe Gazzola about Dr. Tamburri’s recent book The Columbus Affair.

Free and open to the public. Click here to see the event ad.
Info: josephine.fusco@stonybrook.edu

THE COLUMBUS AFFAIR engages in the intellectual, crisscrossing zigzag of a quagmire that is the Columbus Affair and hence demonstrates the major complexities of such argumentation. The goal, modest it may seem, is to examine aspects of each side, with the hopes of spurring on an even greater discussion among all parties within our Italian/American semiosphere. After all, one of numerous issues with which Italian Americans at large need to come to terms is the Columbus Affair. Education, philanthropy, social and cultural activism are just three other issues that reside on the same plane. There is an interconnection here, the sight of which we cannot lose.

Tre Donne: Kitty Genovese, Diane di Prima, Virginia Apuzzo, and the Roots of Italian American Feminism in 1960s New York

Award-winning historian Marcia Gallo (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) will discuss the lives and times of three barrier-breaking women of the sixties: Kitty Genovese, Diane di Prima, Virginia Apuzzo. Gallo’s Brooklyn- and Bronx-born subjects present a novel perspective on women’s oppression and liberation in the decade. Genovese became a national symbol of urban apathy after her murder in 1964 at age twenty-eight in Kew Gardens, Queens. Di Prima helped launch the Beat literary movement and remains a prolific feminist poet, playwright, memoirist, and activist. Apuzzo, a former nun and pioneer gay rights and AIDS activist, led the National LGBTQ Task Force and headed state and federal commissions on labor and consumer affairs. Cosponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Italian Heritage and Culture Committee of New York, and Baruch College History Club. For more information, call (646) 312-4334.