The Italian Diaspora Studies Summer School is a three-week summer program at the University of Calabria (Arcavacata di Rende) that takes place June 15th through July 3rd. The Summer School is designed to introduce participants 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 of the five courses are taught by leading scholars in the field. Faculty includes: Marcella Bencivenni, Margherita Ganeri, Fred Gardaphé, Donato Santeramo, Joseph Sciorra, and An­thony Julian Tamburri. Lectures will be offered by leading scholars from a variety of disci­plines.

Program Directors

Faculty

Marcella Bencivenni is Associate Professor of History at Hostos Community College of The City University of New York. A graduate (with honors) of the University of Calabria, Italy, she received her M.A. from New York University and her Ph.D. from The City Uni­versity of New York Graduate Center, where she studied Italian immigration under the di­rection of the late Philip V. Cannistraro, an expert on Italian Fascism and one of the pioneers of Italian American studies. She is the author of Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2011, 2014), and the co-editor, with Ron Hayduk, of Radical Perspectives on Immigration (Rout­ledge, 2008). She has also published over a dozen book chapters, articles and historio­graphical essays on topics related to Italian immigration and U.S. labor history, and was recently featured in the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?”, helping Italian American actress Valerie Bertinelli tracing her past. Marcella is presently editing the five-volume-autobiography of Carl Marzani, one of America’s foremost radicals and the first victim of the Cold War, for publication in a single volume and has also started a new book project on the meaning and legacy of the Triangle fire of 1911 within Italian immigration history and memory.

Margherita Ganeri is Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Calabria (Italy). She has published widely on various topics related to the Italian and to the Italian/American Literature and Criticism. She has been visiting professor in Cambridge University (UK), Stony Brook University (US), Italian School at Middlebury college (US), and other universities in Europe and Australia. In the current academic year 20014-15 she holds the University of Chicago’s Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Italian Studies. Among her books: Il romanzo storico in Italia. Il dibattito critico dalle origini al postmoderno (1999), Pirandello romanziere (2001), L’Europa in Sicilia. Saggi su Federico De Roberto (2005), L’America italiana. Epos e storytelling in Helen Barolini (2010), recently translated in English: The Italian America. Epos and storytelling in Helen Barolini, Mimesis International (2015).

Fred Gardaphé is Distinguished Professor of English and Italian American Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He is past director of the Italian/American and American Studies Programs at Stony Brook University. His books include Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer, Moustache Pete is Dead!, Leaving Little Italy, and From Wiseguys to Wise Men: Masculinities and the Italian American Gangster, and The Art of Reading Italian Americana. He is co-founding/co-editor of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and editor of the Italian American Culture Series of SUNY Press.

Donato Santeramo is Head of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University. He is cross-appointed to the Department of Drama and is associated with the Cultural Studies Graduate Program. He also holds appointments at the University of Rome II and at Middlebury College, VT (Summer Language Schools) where he teaches graduate courses in Italian literature, Theatre and Semiotics. Dr. Santeramo received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto where he was later the Emilio Goggio Chair Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published extensively on Italian literature and theatre, Film and Semiotics. He has translated and staged works of contemporary Italian playwrights in Kingston, Toronto and New York: Injury Time, Words in the Dark and An Evening to celebrate the life and Work of Dario Fo (1997 Nobel Prize for Literature). He is on the editorial boards of several academic journals including Pirandelliana, Libero: Rivista del documentario, and Letteratura e interpretazione. Dr. Santeramo also participated in several creative and artistic endeavors including the art exhibit Chromosomes (Rome 2008 and Lisbon 2009) and co-edited the book Red Cars–An Original Screenplay by David Cronenberg (2005). He was also co-founder of the Toronto Italian Outdoor Film Festival and was member of the Advisory Board of the Toronto Festival of Italian Cinema. He served on the jury of the Arlecchino d’Oro European Acting Prize and was President of the “Teatro Scuola” Adjudicating Committee for best play for the Centro nazionale di studi pirandelliani. He is presently working on the Italian Immigrant experience shaping the Canadian Political scene. In 2004 Dr. Santeramo was awarded the prestigious Queen’s University Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Joseph Sciorra is Director of Academic and Cultural Programs at Queens College’s John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. As a folklorist, Joseph has conducted ethnographic research with numerous New York City communities, in particular Italian Americans, implementing public programming such as museum exhibitions, concert series, and video documentaries, as well as publishing on religious practices, material culture, and vernacular music, among other topics. He is the editor of the social science and cultural studies journal Italian American Review and of Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives (Fordham UP, 2010), co-editor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (UP of Mississippi, 2014) and Graces Received: Painted and Metal Ex-votos from Italy (Calandra Institute, 2012). Sciorra is the author of R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art (Henry Holt & Co., 1994; Thames & Hudson, 2002) and Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (U Tennessee P, 2015).

Anthony Julian Tamburri is Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY) and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Lit­eratures. He is co-director of Bordighera Press, past president of the Italian American Studies Association and of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. His latest authored books include: Una semiotica dell’etnicità: nuove segnalature per la letteratura italiano/americana (Cesati, 2010); Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (Bordi­ghera, 2011); and Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014). His is co-editor for translations with Robert Viscusi and James Periconi of the English version of Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 (Fordham UP, 2014), edited in Italian by Francesco Durante; and together with Paul Giordano and Fred Gardaphè, From The Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (Purdue UP, 1991/2000). He is the executive producer and host of the Calandra Institute’s monthly TV program, Italics, produced in collaboration with CUNY TV. He also directs the Italian Series for Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Special Thanks