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50th

Annual Italian American Studies Association Conference Bios:

Dr. Sarah Annunziato teaches Italian Studies at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), where

she also edits the departmental newsletter, La Vendemmia and organizes the Italian Studies Cineforum.

Her current research interests include Italian children’s literature, crime fiction in Italy, Italian cinema,

and Italian American relations. She has taught courses in Italian language, literature, and film. Sarah

holds a BA in Italian and Government from Smith College (Northampton, MA) and a PhD from The

Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD).

Enza Antenos received her B.A. (Italian and French), M.A.(Romance Languages) and Ph.D.(Italian

Studies) from the University of Toronto. During a brief break from academia, she pursued her passion for

technology, working at IBM Canada. She joined Montclair State University in 2004, teaches various

language and culture courses and is the teacher education coordinator in Italian. Publications include

elementary Italian programs (textbooks, workbooks and self-study guides) in Italica; the professional

preparation of Italian teachers in Foreign Language Annals; and social networking and Web 2.0

technology via Twitter in Calico Monograph 8, The Next Generation: Social Networking and Online

Collaboration in Foreign Language Learning. She continues to explore emerging technologies and their

role in foreign language education. Beyond different social networking sites, such as blogs and

microblogging, her current investigations examine the potential of personal learning environments and

mobile-assisted language learning.

Claude Barbre, M.Div., Ph.D., L.P., is Full Professor, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology,

and lead faculty in the Psychology and Spirituality Studies. An Executive Director of The Harlem Family

Institute in New York City for 12 years, he is a Daniel Day Williams Fellow in Psychiatry and Religion at

Union Theological Seminary, and the William B. Given Fellow of the Episcopal Church Foundation.

Author of prize-winning articles, books, and poetry, Dr. Barbre is the recipient of the 2016-17 Ted

Rubenstein Teaching Award (TCS), and a five-time recipient of the International Gradiva Award for his

writings in the arts and humanities.

Dennis Barone is the author of seven books of short fiction, including On the Bus: Selected

Stories (Blaze Vox, 2012). He is also the author of two novellas, Temple of the Rat (Left Hand Books,

2000) and God’s Whisper (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), and the author of a collection of prose poems, The

Walls of Circumstance (AvecBooks, 2004). Bordighera Press published his study of Italian-American

narrative America / Trattabili in 2011. Barone is editor of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul

Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), New Hungersfor Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-

American Poetry (Star Cloud Press, 2011), and Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since

1776 (Wesleyan UP, 2012). Left Hand Books published his selected poems volumeone, Separate Objects,

in 1998, and Shearsman Books published volume two entitled Parallel Lines in 2011. In 2015 Quale Press

published his mixed genre book Sound / Hammer and in 2016 the SUNY Press published his

study Beyond Memory: Italian Protestants in Italy and America. In 2017 Bordighera Press published his

book Second Thoughts, a work of short fictions and prose poems. A graduate of Bard College, he

received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.

Pietro Bocchia is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame and

expects to complete his dissertation, entitled “Religion, Politics, and Art: Pier Paolo Pasolini and 1968,”

and graduate in August (2017). He earned his PhD degree in Italian Language History and Literature from

the State University of Milan–Dissertation title: "La lotta interiore del Petrarca: un percorso critico tra

Familiares, Secretum, Canzoniere e Trionfi." He received a master's degree in Italian Modern Literature

(Literature and Linguistics, Italian and Romance Philology) from the the State University of Milan–

Thesis title: "La semantica della guerra nell’Inferno di Dante: la pugna spiritualis nei canti II e IX." He is

interested in Medieval and Humanistic Italian Literature, Contemporary Italian Literature, and Film

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Studies. He published articles on Dante, Petrarch, and Pasolini. His latest publication is: “Ragione e

religione in Pasolini: il caso di ‘Teorema.’” Studi pasoliniani, 10 (2016): 73-85.

Laura Buonanno holds a PhD in Political Science from The Johns Hopkins University (1990). She is a

Professor of Public Administration and Politics and works in the fields of Comparative Politics and

International Relations. She teaches a variety of courses from law to migration policy and research

methods and the author of numerous articles and books in her field. Her forthcoming book is entitled The

Rhetoric of Italian-American Identity and is currently in revision.

Michael Buonanno is a professor of English and Anthropology at State College of Florida, Manatee-

Sarasota. His research interests include folklore, rhetorical theory, and culture and identity.

Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of

Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he teaches courses in Italian, Film, and Gender Studies. He is the author of

Divergenze in celluloide: colore, migrazione e identità sessuale nei film gay di Ferzan Ozpetek (Celluloid

Divergences: Color, Migration, and Sexual Identity in the Gay Series of Ferzan Ozpetek) with Mimesis

editore and editor of the forthcoming collections of essays, Pasolini’s Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros,

and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

(Fall 2017). His research interests include the integration of gender, class, and migration in both Italian

and Italian American literature and cinema. He has recently been awarded one of four Fulbright Awards

for the Foundation of the South to conduct research and teach at the University of Calabria, Arcavacata

for the Spring of 2017. His next research project examines the visual, semiotic, and affect foodways

provokes in Italian and Italian American cinema. Calabretta-Sajder is currently the Director of

Communications for the American Association of Teachers of Italian, the President of Gamma Kappa

Alpha, the National Italian Honors Society, the Co-chair for the Committee of Graduate Students in the

Profession for the Modern Language Association, an Executive Committee member of the Italian

American Studies Association, and Secretary/Treasurer of the American Association of University

Supervisors and Coordinators. In May 2015 he received a research grant from the South Central MLA

Association to conduct archival research on Italian American authors at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare

Book and Manuscript Library. He has created and teaches MADE IN ITALY at the University of

Arkansas Rome Center.

Dominic Candeloro was born in Chicago Heights, graduated from Bloom Township High school,

Northwestern University, and received his PhD in history from the University of Illinois Urbana.

Candeloro was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for over $300,000 to

“Document and Share the History of Italians in Chicago.” He was named a Fulbright Fellow (Italy 1981-

82), Candeloro has been deeply involved in a national organization of scholars, the American Italian

Historical Association, now known as the Italian American Studies Association since 1976. In the last

few years, Candeloro has focused on the Florence Roselli Library and the publication of books by Casa

Italia. Reconstructing Italians in Chicago: Thirty Authors in Search of Roots and Branches, appeared in

2011 under the editorship of Candeloro and Professor Fred Gardaphe. In 2013 the Casa Italia publication

was an anthology Italian Women in Chicago: Madonna Mia! QUI debbo vivere? Edited by Candeloro,

Kathy Catrambone, and Gloria Nardini. Candeloro and Tony Fornelli led a successful campaign to create

an endowment to support a professorship of Italian American Studies into perpetuity at Loyola University

Chicago.

One of the nation's premiere authorities on Italian and Italian American studies, Peter Carravetta, PhD,

was named Stony Brook University’s first Alfonse M. D’Amato Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian

American Studies in 2008. An author, critic, artist and translator, Carravetta secured both a Fulbright

Junior Research Grant in 1999 (Rome), and a Fulbright Senior Lectureship Award in 2003 (Madrid), and

has published more than 100 articles and shorter works, as well as several full-length studies in

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interpretation theory, and cultural studies. Born in Calabria, he grew up in the Bronx. He is the current

coordinator of Stony Brook’s Italian American Studies Program.

Maria Giovanna Cassa worked many years as a social worker with adults in urban marginal zones and

mental health services and with association promoting cultural knowledge on migration and local

community/neighborhoods social development. In 2013 receives the Master Degree in Anthropological

and Ethnological Sciences in the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy with a thesis on urban

anthropology. Since 2014 PhD student in Social and Cutural Antropology in the University of Milano

Bicocca, Italy with a research on Italian migration to Morocco and Italian transnational families.

Jonathan Cavallero teaches Film Theory and Criticism at Bates. His research interests include

race/ethnicity and media; film and television history; Hollywood film; Bollywood; media authorship;

U.S. cultural history; and multiculturalism and pedagogy. Cavallero’s writing has appeared in such

journals as The Journal of Film and Video, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, MELUS,

Italianamericana, and VIA: Voices in Italian Americana. His book titled Hollywood’s Italian American

Filmmakers: Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino was published by the University of

Illinois Press in May, 2011. Cavallero has taught at University of Arkansas, Penn State University and

Indiana University, where he received the Excellence in Teaching Award In 2006 (for “Introduction to

Media”) and in 2007 (for “Public Speaking”). His interest in studying Italian Americans springs from his

own Italian American background. Cavallero’s great grandparents immigrated to the US with their

families between 1910 and 1912. As a third generation Italian American growing up in the suburbs of

Washington, DC and Philadelphia, Cavallero often looked to the movies and television for a sense of

cultural definition.

Francesco Chianese holds a MA in Contemporary Italian Literature from University of Naples Federico

II and a PhD in Comparative Literature (Italian and US American Literature) from the University of

Naples “L’Orientale”, where he wrote a thesis on Padri e figli nella tarda modernità: Pier Paolo Pasolini e

Philip Roth, un’analisi comparata. He completed part of his PhD research at the University of Bristol. He

continued his research after his PhD at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität of Berlin thanks to

an EAAS travel grant and a DAAD short-term research grant. He wrote on John Fante for the volume

Scrivere tra le lingue (Aracne, 2017). He also published in the journals Il Mulino (2016), Between (2015,

2017) and Iperstoria (2014); and in the volumes La lezione di Pasolini (Mimesis, forthcoming 2017),

Harbors, Flows, and Migrations: The USA in/and the World (Cambridge Scolars, 2017) and Le attese (A

est dell’equatore, 2015). He has presented at national and international conferences on Don DeLillo, F.

Scott Fitzgerald, John Fante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Philip Roth, Walter Siti, on graphic novelist Alessandro

Baronciani and Will Eisner and on TV Series The Sopranos and Gomorrah – The Series. He presented at

the IASA conference 2016, held at the California State University, Long Beach. He was the co-organizer

of the panel The Italian American Turning Point: Bringing Home the Italian American Literature and

Culture at the 2016 Interim Conference of the British Society for Italian Studies, held at the Trinity

College of Dublin.

Joanna Clapps Herman is the author of three books, including a memoir, The AnarchistBastard, and a

collection of stories, No Longer and Not Yet. She has also edited twoanthologies of Italian American

writing. She teaches creative writing at ManhattanvilleCollege.

Kathy Curto teaches at The Writing Institute/Sarah Lawrence College and Montclair State University.

Her work has been published in the anthology, Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re

Saying Now, and in The New York Times, Barrelhouse, La Voce di New York, Drift, Talking

Writing, Junk, The Inquisitive Eater, The Asbury Park Press, Italian Americana, VIA-Voices in Italian

Americana and Lumina. She has been the recipient of the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship, the

Montclair State University Engaged Teaching Fellowship and serves on the faculty of the Joe Papaleo

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Writers’ Workshop in Cetara, Italy. Curto lives in Cold Spring, New York with her husband and their

four children.

Marie D'Amico is an independent scholar, who lives and works in New York City.

Rose De Angelis teaches American and Ethnic literature at Marist College, where she is Professor of

English. She has published numerous articles on Italian and Italian-American literature and culture and

edited a collection of essays entitled Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse

(Routledge). She has also authored articles on Toni Morrison, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, and

Edith Wharton.

Karen De Luca is a writer and painter. Born in Boston, she has lived in Mexico City for over thirty

years. Her most recent project, a screenplay, Hitting Home, set in an Italian neighborhood in Boston in

1937 is a story about baseball, immigrants, and how our national pastime is a crucial part of learning what

it means to be American.

Alexandra de Luise is a librarian at Queens College, City University of New York. She holds Masters

degrees in Art History and Library Science. She currently serves as Secretary of the Italian American

Studies Association.

Brenda DeMartini-Squires will read from her novel-in-progress, The Fabulous Scarpellos, the

humorous tale of Gina Scarpello’s attempted escape from her large Italian family, proprietors of Over the

Rainbow, a Hudson Valley neighborhood bar and catering company and the Hazel Arms Apartments in

which three generations live together in general disharmony. Set in the late 1980s, the story follows Gina

on her journey from her NY suburban hometown, her overbearing family and her unfaithful, delusional

boyfriend to a graduate program in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri where she intends to

study with (and worship) feminist performance artist, Tatania Mint. But before she can get away, she has

to serve as maid of honor for one more family wedding. She is an Associate Professor of English and

Director of the Writing Center at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY. A graduate of the

Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her writing has appeared in many literary magazines including The Sun,

Confrontation, the Minnesota Review, Mississippi Mud, Southern Indiana Review, Three Rivers Poetry

Journal, Midwest Review, Kansas Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review and Open Places.

Michele C. Deramo is Assistant Provost for Diversity Education in the Office for Inclusion and Diversity

at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include forced migration, diaspora studies, feminist theory, and

autoethnography.

Joanne L. DeTore, Ph.D. is a published poet, essayist, and scholar. Her work has been published in a

variety of journals including Reed Magazine, Voices in Italian Americana, Italian Americana, Review

Americana: A Literary Journal, The Apple Valley Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, The Journal of

the Association for Research on Mothering, Art Ciencia: Revista de Arte, Cincia e Communicacao,

And/Or Literary Journal, and Florida English and in the books, Anti-Italianism: Essays on Prejudice,

Fractured Feminisms: Rhetoric, Context, and Contestation, Joy, Interrupted, and Sweet Lemons: Writing

with a Sicilian Accent. She has appeared on national TV as an expert on pop culture. She is an Associate

Professor of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach

where she teaches a class on Italian American Film and Culture and is a member of the Executive Board

of the IASA.

Dr. Michele Fazio is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Theatre and Foreign

Languages at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and teaches courses on American literature,

contemporary U.S. ethnic literature, service-learning, and working-class studies. She is past-president of

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the Working-Class Studies Association and a recent recipient of a New England Consortium Fellowship

provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society to conduct archival research for her book project on the

cultural legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti. She has served twice as a visiting professor at the University of

Calabria and is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies.

Jessica Femiani's poems and essays have appeared in the Paterson Literary Review; she was a finalist for

the American Voice in Poetry Prize 2009. Jessica is pursuing her doctorate in English and Creative

Writing at Binghamton University. There she is a writing instructor in the Writing Initiative, an editor for

Binghamton Writes, and a creative writing instructor in the Binghamton Poetry Project.

Thomas J. Ferraro is Frances Hill Fox Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of

Feeling Italian. The Art of Ethnicity in America (NYU Press 2005) and Ethnic Passages. Literary

Immigrants in 20th Century America (U of Chicago P 1993) as well as the editor of Catholic Lives,

Contemporary America (Duke UP, 1997). He is the recipient of both a Fulbright Scholarship and a

Fulbright Lectureship (Università Cà Foscari, Venezia, Italy, 2012 and 2013).

Dr. Francesco Fiumara is Associate Professor of Spanish and Italian at Southeastern Louisiana

University (Hammond, LA). His current research interests include the linguistic and literary relationship

between Spain and Italy, the history of Italian radio and television, and the Italian experience in the

United States of America. His works have been published in miscellaneous books, conference

proceedings, and peer-reviewed journals such as Incontri meridionali, MLN, Romanistische Jahrbuch,

Symposium, Florida English, and Journal of Italian Cinema and Media studies.

Fred Gardaphé is Distinguished Professor of English and Italian American studies at Queens

College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. 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, From Wiseguys to Wise Men,

and The Art of Reading Italian Americana.

John Gennari is Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont.

He is the author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (University of Chicago

Press, 2017), a study of black/Italian cultural intersections in music, film, sports, and foodways. His

earlier book, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006), was

awarded the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John Cawelti

Award for the Best Book in American Culture. Gennari has held fellowships from the National

Endowment for the Humanities, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and the Carter G.

Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.

Maria Giura will read from her memoir-in-progress about her struggle to accept her true calling while in

the midst of a romantic relationship with a Catholic priest and her conflicted feelings for God and her

Italian immigrant father. An excerpt from the memoir won an award from Salem College and placed her

as a finalist for the Milton Center Fellowship, which supports emerging writers in bridging imagination

and religious faith. She has been published in Prime Number, Italian Americana, VIA, Lips, Brooklyn

Film & Arts Festival and Godspy. She also has awards from the Academy of American Poets and the

Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. She has over ten years teaching experience at Montclair State University

and SUNY Binghamton. Her first collection of poems, What My Father Taught Me, which explores some

of the same themes as her memoir, was recently accepted for publication by Bordighera.

www.mariagiura.com

Alan J. Gravano has an MFA in Poetry and an M.A. and Ph. D. in English from the University of Miami

in Coral Gables, Florida. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Gulf Stream: South

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Florida’s Literary Current, Ellipsis, the museum of americana, Review Americana: A Literary Journal,

and Voices in Italian Americana. He has co-edited two collections of essays on Italian American culture,

film, and literature and has published two essays on Don DeLillo. Currently, he is President of the Italian

American Studies Association and is the Writing Center Director at Rocky Mountain University.

Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen is a Professor of Literature at State College of Florida. She has studied

Ezra Pound’s Cantos in northern Italy and has also researched and studied Pound in Madrid, Spain. She

has published on Italian-Americana, Ezra Pound, Ida Lupino, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Donne to name a

few and has presented her work on Italianity and on Pound nationally and internationally. Her work on

Donne has been translated into Portuguese and published in the Brazilian journal Revisto Espaço

Académico. She earned her doctorate in Literature and Theory from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

George Guida is a novelist, poet, and scholar; author of eight books, including twocollections of essays,

four collections of poems, and two collections of short fiction. He apast President of the Italian American

Studies Association and Professor in English at NewYork City College of Technology, CUNY.

Dr. Lucia G. Harrison holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Spanish from the University of Kentucky and a

Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Verona, Italy. A native of Italy, she

has assumed teaching and/or administrative responsibilities at Louisiana State University, the University

of Tennessee, and Southeastern Louisiana University. She joined Southeastern in 1996, and became Head

of the Department in 2003, first of Foreign Languages and Literature, and since 2010, of Languages and

Communication. Besides being department head, she is also the Director of International Initiatives at

Southeastern. Dr. Harrison taught a variety of courses in Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and she has been

recognized for her teaching accomplishments with the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at

Southeastern and the Kentucky Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching. She has also been very

active in sustaining her research interests and she has remained active in scholarship through professional

organizations, conferences and publications.

Lina Insana is Associate Professor of Italian, Director of Italian Studies and Chair, Dept. of French and

Italian. She holds a PhD in Italian from the University of Pennsylvania (2000). She is the author of

Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony. Toronto: U of

Toronto P, 2009 and numerous articles on Primo Levi. In addition, she has published most recently on

Mediterranean Studies and has taught in the CLIA Program at the University of Calabria.

Jerome Krase is Emeritus and Murray Koppelman Professor, Brooklyn College CUNY. He is a Public

Scholar who writes, photographs, and lectures globally including universities at Rome, Padua, Urbino,

Trento, Trieste, Bari, and Pisa. A few of his recent Italian American relevant works include The Review of

I-A Studies (2000), Race and Ethnicity in NYC (2005), Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World. (2007),

Seeing Cities Change (2012), The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies (2012) and Race,

Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street (2016). A Founding Member the American

Italian Coalition of Organizations (1978), he was Brooklyn College Center for I-A Studies Director

(1975-84), received the Monsignor Gino Baroni Award (Italian Americana 2005), and was American

Italian Historical Association President (1993-97) (For those who are ethnically inquisitive, his mother

Martha Rose Cangelosi’s family came from Sicily in the late Nineteenth Century.)

Dr. Salvatore J. LaGumina is Professor Emeritus and Director of the Center for Italian American

Studies at Nassau Community College. He has been president of the American Italian Historical

Association, has written dozens of scholarly articles, and is author, editor or co-editor of seventeen books,

including The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, From Steerage to Suburb: Long Island

Italians, and Wop: A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination. He is a recognized authority on

Italian American history and the author of numerous books and articles on the subject. Combining his

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wealth of knowledge with more than 200 exceptional photographs, he has produced an informative and

enlightening portrait of the Italian people—at home, at work, and in society—who did so much toward

developing the communities of Long Island.

Benjamin Lawton is Associate Professor of Italian, Interim Director of Film & Video Studies, and Chair

of Italian Studies. He teaches at Purdue University and writes about cultural construction in cinema.

Translator of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Heretical Empiricism (Indiana University Press, 1988; New Academia

Publishing, 2005), Lawton has edited over fifteen volumes on film studies, cultural studies, and Romance

languages and literatures. Most recently, with Elena Coda, he co-edited Re-Visioning Terrorism: A

Humanistic Perspective (Purdue University Press, 2016).

Lorraine Mangione, Ph.D., is the author, with Dr. Donna DiCello, of Daughters, Dads, and the Path

through Grief: Tales from Italian America, which is based on interviews with Italian American women

about their fathers. She graduated from Duke University and the University of Kansas and is a professor

in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University New England in Keene, NH, where she

teaches doctoral students.

Cinzia Marongiu has a Laurea in English literature from Università degli Studi di Genova and a Master‘s

Degree in Italian literature from Indiana University. She is currently a PhD candidate at Johannes

Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz at the American Studies Department studying Italian American literature,

Italian American women literature in particular. In 2016, she received a Wiedereinstiegstipendium

Scholarship to support her graduate studies. Her dissertation, which explores the relationship between

Italian Americans and African Americans narrated by female authors, is a transdisciplinary project

engaging with the American Studies and Italian Studies Departments of the Johannes Gutenberg-

Universität. She is also interested in post-colonial studies, Italian transnational literature and Black

diaspora studies.

Jan Marta, a Canadian of Italian descent, is a literary scholar and academic psychiatrist working at the

intersections of the humanities, medicine, psychiatry, and bioethics, with a particular focus on literature

and medicine, cross-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy, narrative medicine, and narrative bioethics.

She has published in Literature and Medicine, Theoretical Medicine, Métaphores, Présence francophone,

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Essays on Canadian Writing, among other peer-

reviewed journals. She has presented on topics regarding Italian Canadians and Muslim Canadians at

international conferences, and on narrative medicine and narrative bioethics in Morocco and in Iran. She

holds a Doctorat de littérature comparée (French, Spanish, English) on the theory of literary metaphor as

socially transformative, applied to French Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, and Chilean poetry of

decolonization. Currently she is pursuing further studies at the University of Toronto on Italian language,

linguistics, and literature, and Arabic language, literature, and history.

Rocco Mesiti is a professor of Italian Culture at Western New England University and co-directs the

university's summer program in Sorrento, Italy at Sant'Anna Institute. He has a Doctoral Degree in

Educational Leadership from the University of Hartford. In addition, Mesiti has a Masters in Italian

Language and a Bachelor’s in Italian Language and Culture from the University of Massachusetts

(Amherst). He is an active contributor to several Italian communities, cultural centers, clubs and

orgnizations in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 2013, he was a recipient of the Servium Award by the

Italian Cultural Center of Western Massachusetts. Since 1992, Mesiti has produced and hosted "Dolce

Vita" a weekly Italian American radio program on 90.7 FM WTCC from Springfield Technical

Community College. Mesiti's areas of interest are Italian folk music and films, Italian Diaspora,

intercultural competency and documentary filmmaking.

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Janet Michello is Associate Professor at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New

York where she has been teaching for 20 years. Prior to that she taught at Wayne College, a branch

campus of the University of Akron. She is co-author of the book, A Sociology of Mental Illness, in

addition to a number of other publications. She resides in a suburb of New York City.

Joanne R. Milner, 59, is a Life Story Coach with Pictures and Stories. She is the executive producer of

the documentary production, Our Story: Italian-Americans in Utah, which aired on local PBS stations,

and was the recipient of a grant from the NIAF, which enabled copies of the DVD to be accessible in

media libraries for every junior high in the state as a resource for Utah history curriculum. Milner is a

recognized advocate for the Italian-American Community in Utah where she authored a resolution

formally recognizing October as Italian-American Heritage Month in Utah, and is the director of Our

Story/Your Story documentary productions, a non-profit organization, Connecting Families: past, present

and future. As an emissary for the Office of the Mayor in Salt Lake City, she coordinated an educational

and entertainment presentation on Italian Family History and Genealogy for Esperienza Italia 2011, in

Torino, Italy commemorating the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Milner recently retired

from serving nearly 10 years in the Mayor’s Office as the Education Partnership Coordinator, a senior

advisor to the Mayor, and special assistant to the Salt Lake City School District Superintendent for A

Capital City Education: Cultivating A College, Career, and Civic Ready Environment in Salt Lake

City. A former member of the Salt Lake City Council, and a three-term member Utah State Legislature,

(democrat), Milner also served as Chair of the State Legislative Ethics Committee and Chair of the Utah

State Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In addition to her professional and

political pursuits, she was the producer and host of Cultural Connections, and Perspective: The Changing

Face of Utah, weekly public affairs programs showcasing diversity and cultural traditions on KSL

NEWSRADIO for nearly a decade.

Kristy Nabhan-Warren is Professor and V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies at The

University of Iowa. Her research and teaching focuses on the interplay of religion, ethnicity, and gendered

identities. She is the author of two books, The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic

Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism (NYU P, 2005) and The Cursillo Movement in America:

Catholics, Protestants and Fourth-Day Spirituality (UNC P, 2015). She is currently editing The

Handbook of Latino/a Christianities for Oxford UP (Forthcoming Spring 2020) and is working on her

third manuscript, Cornbelt America: Faith, Family, and Work in the Heartland. She is also Series Editor

of The University of North Carolina new book series “Ethnographies of Religion.”

Gloria Nardini’s Ph.D. is in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Her dissertation was published by SUNY press as “Che Bella Figura! The Power of Performance in an

Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago” (2000). Among folklorists in particular, it has become a sort of classic in

explaining the important Italian cultural code of fare bella figura. Nardini was one of the three writers of

Italian Women in Chicago: Madonna mia! QUI debbo vivere? (2013). She has published many articles

and done many seminars and presentations on these Italian subjects. She has near-native fluency in Italian

and has spoken to groups in Italy. Nardini also did much corporate work through Loyola University,

Chicago, in which she trained in Business Writing, Business Presentation, and Cultural Differences.

Currently, she is retired from any kind of teaching although often asked to speak to university classes.

Dr. Robert Orsi, the son of an Italian immigrant father and a Sicilian-American mother, was born and

raised in an Italian and Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. He graduated from Trinity College in

Connecticut and received a Ph.D. in 1982 from Yale University, where his dissertation became the basis

for his first book, The Madonna of 115th Street. He is also author of Between Heaven and Earth: The

Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them; Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s

Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes; and several edited collections and essays. His most

recent book is History and Presence(Belknap, Harvard UP, 2016). Dr. Orsi has taught at L’Universitá

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degli Studi di Roma, Fordham University, Indiana University, and Harvard University. He is now at

Northwestern University, where he is the first holder of the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic

Studies. Dr. Orsi studies American religious history and contemporary practice and American

Catholicism in both its historical and ethnographic perspective. He is also widely recognized for his work

on theory and method for the study of religion. Dr. Orsi is a fellowship recipient of the Guggenheim

Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Social

Science Research Council. In 2016-2017, he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at the Radcliffe

Institute for Advanced Study.

Samuele F. S. Pardini is Associate Professor of American Studies and Italian Studies at Elon University,

where he serves as Coordinator of the American Studies Program. H eis the author of In the Name of the

Mother. Italian Americans, African Americans and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce

Springsteen (UPNE 2017) and the editor of The Devil Gets His Due. The Uncollected Essays of Leslie

Fiedler (Counterpoint Press 2008 and 2010).

James Periconi is the author, most recently, of “Italian American Book Publishing and Bookselling,”

in The Routledge History of Italian Americans. He was the bibliographic editor of Italoamericana: the

Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943, ed. Francesco Durante, Robert Viscusi, Editor of the

American Edition (Fordham U. Press, 2014). He exhibited his collection of the literature of Italian

Americans written, published and printed in the U.S. from the late 19th century through the end of World

War II, at the Grolier Club of New York in 2012, catalogued in Strangers in a Strange Land: A Catalogue

of an Exhibition on the History of Italian-Language American Imprints (1830-1945) (Grolier Club, 2012).

Lisa Ferrante Perrone is an assistant professor of Italian Studies at Bucknell University, where she

teaches language courses and a freshman seminar on the Italian American experience. Her research

interests focus on pedagogy and Italian American Studies. She is an ACTFL certified Oral Proficiency

Interview Tester of English.

Maria Protti is an attorney and legal information specialist. She holds a MLIS from UC Berkeley, a

MPA from U of Oklahoma, and a JD from UCLA. She was a member of the UCLA Law Review and the

Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal. She studies the experience of Italian Americans

in the Western United States.

Stanislao G. Pugliese is professor of modern European history and the Queensboro Unico Distinguished

Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University. Dr. Pugliese is a former research

fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, the United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Oxford University, Harvard University and the inaugural Italian

Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation fellow at the Istituto Campano per la Storia della

Resistenza in Naples. For the 2014-15 academic year, he will be a visiting scholar at the Center for

European and Mediterranean Studies, at NYU. In 2005, the Association of Italian American Educators

named him College Professor of the Year. A specialist on modern Italy, the anti-fascist Resistance and

Italian Jews, Dr. Pugliese is the author, editor or translator of a dozen books on Italian and Italian

American history. His first book, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Harvard

University Press, 1999) has been translated into Italian, Russian and Romanian. His essays on Italian and

Italian-American history and culture regularly appear in academic and popular journals, and he is the

editor of the Italian and Italian American Studies series published by Palgrave Macmillan. Since 1996,

Professor Pugliese has directed the Italian American Lecture Series at Hofstra University. With William

Connell and under the auspices of Unico national, he is co-editing the forthcoming Routledge History of

Italian Americans, a monumental work of scholarship at 600 pages and with over 50 contributors.

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Susan B. Ridgely is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She

uses the methodologies of lived religion to analyze the role of age and intergenerational engagement in

religious practice. She is the author of Practicing What the Doctor Preached: At Home with Focus on

the Family (Oxford University Press, 2016), When I was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First

Communion (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and two edited volumes on theories and methods

for including children in the academic study of religion. Her current project uses archival research and

oral histories to explore the generational consequences of the desegregation of the diocese of Raleigh,

North Carolina in 1953.

Colleen Ryan has taught courses across the curriculum from beginning and intermediate language to

Italian and Italian American culture courses in translation, to graduate courses in foreign language

teaching methods, advanced courses in gender studies, courses on contemporary Italian and Italian

American film and literature, and theater workshops including a variety of performances and productions.

From 2007 until 2014, Colleen served as Director of Language Instruction for Italian and since 2015, she

has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Italian. Colleen is the author of Sex, the Self, and the

Sacred: Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini (University of Toronto, 2007) and co-editor of two

volumes dedicated to the teaching of foreign languages through theater arts: Set the Stage! Italian

Language, Literature, and Culture through Theater. Theoretical and Practical Perspectives. (Yale, 2009)

and Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures through Theater. Theoretical

Approaches and Classroom Practices (co-editor, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011). In 2014 she published

an intermediate-level language program (with Daniela Bartalesi Graf). Caleidoscopio (Pearson) is a

second-year textbook project, with strong literary, visual, cinematic and theatrical components. In 2015,

she published a co-edited volume with Lisa Parkes titled Creative Thinking

Frank A. Salamone is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Iona College. He is an

Advanced Facilitator at the University of Phoenix. Salamone has written 4 books on the Italians of

Rochester, NY and many other books and articles on numerous topics. He is married with 7 children,

many grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Sarah Salter has recently accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M

University-Corpus Christi for August 2017. Her current project argues that imaginative exchanges

between Italy and the US shaped embodied experience and material culture for immigrant communities

and American travelers across the long nineteenth century. Salter's research into Italian-language

newspapers in the US has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, and the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies. Her essays have appeared in Ácoma

in Italian, in English in The Henry James Review and the collection Facing Melville, Facing Italy:

Democracy, Politics, Translation. Her work with early 20th-century Italian advertisements is forthcoming

from American Periodicals.

Lyn Scolaro has been at Prospect High School for the past 26 years and has been teaching Italian for 34

years. Lyn earned her Bachelor’s Degree from Rosary College, now Dominican University, in River

Forest. She holds a minor in Spanish and a Master’s Degree in Administration and Supervision from

Roosevelt University and a Master of Arts in Teaching Degree from Aurora University. Lyn has been a

member and an officer of the AATI-Midwest Chapter where she currently serves as Co-President. She is

the Vice President K-12 of the AATI National organization, she is a member of the Osservatorio of the

Consul General’s Office of Chicago, and is a member of the Development Committee for the AP Italian

Language and Culture exam and serves as the College Board Advisor for Italian. She also serves as a

Board Member for the Illinois Directors of Student Activities. She has been a participant and presenter of

Italian and Co-Curricular Activities for numerous organizations. For 14 years, she has worked diligently

on scope and sequence for the AP exam as well as teaching Italian so “you learn smarter, not harder” in

her classes. Ms. Scolaro has been a contributor to the Fra Noi, Il Canguro of the A.N.E.A, to the book

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Italians in Chicago, and to the North American supplement of the Italian pedagogy journal In.it published

by Guerra in Italy, L’Italiano: Scope and Sequence, Skills and Components. Among other recognitions,

Ms. Scolaro received the Distinguished Service Award from the National AATI, for Outstanding

Contributions to the promotion of the AATI and of Italian Studies in North America in 2012 as well as

the Premio Dante from the AATI-Midwest. Ms. Scolaro’s AP Italian Class was recently awarded a

$100,000 grant from the Frantoi Redoro company in Grezzana, Verona, Italia. The students are

pursuing high school to career projects based on their future career plans while using Italian.

Susan Scutti writes poems, novels, and short stories, which have appeared in journals and anthologies,

including Loose Change, Oxford Quarterly, Sensitive Skin, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.

Her novels include A Kind of Sleep. She currently lives in Atlanta where she works as a Health Writer for

CNN.

A native of Italy, Dr. Patrizia Famà Stahle has lived most her adult life in the United States and became

a U.S. citizen in 1995. She holds a Laura degree in Humanities from the University of Catania, Italy; and

a Master and Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Before moving to Georgia with her family, she taught for University of Maryland overseas to American

military personnel stationed in Italy both for University of Maryland European Division (UMUC Europe)

and University of Laverne at NAS Sigonella, Catania, and NAS Naples, Italy. She taught a variety of

courses: US History Survey, World Civilizations, Modern Italy, the Roman Republic and the Roman

Empire, Italian Life and Culture and the Italian language. Dr. Stahle is Associate Professor of History at

the College of Coastal Georgia. where she has taught history full time (both Brunswick campus and

Camden Center) since Fall 2000. She also taught several summers for the University System of Georgia

Study Abroad Montepulciano, Italy (taught Modern Europe, emphasis on the European Union, World

Civilizations and the Italian Language). Her fields of interest are Modern Europe, Modern Italy,

Diplomatic History of the United States, Women’s History and Immigration History. She is Board

member of the Georgia Association of Historians and President of the Guale Historical Society. Her

publications include a monograph Kingsland, Arcadia Publishing (September 2013) and also The Italian

Emigration of Modern Times: Relations between Italy and the United States concerning Emigration

Policy, Diplomacy and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment 1870-1927, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (March

2016).

Teresa Fava Thomas is a professor of history at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts where she

teaches Modern Italian History and Italian-American History. She holds a doctorate in history from Clark

University. Publications - books: The Reluctant Migrants: Migration from the Italian Veneto to Central

Massachusetts published by Teneo Press. Book chapter: “The Assimilationists,” chapter in What is Italian

America? Editor George Guida, a publication of the Italian American Studies Association, (New York,

New York: Bordighera Press, 2016).Recent articles: “Retrospective Review: Giuseppe Grava and

Giovanni Tomasi” in News on the Rialto: Newsletter for Studies on Venetian History, published at BYU,

funded by Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, 2012.Conference presentations:"Columbus Day 1938:

Why Celebrate? Italian Americans in Massachusetts and the Hurricane of '38," Italian American Studies

Conference, Washington, DC, October 16, 2015. Audiovisual requirements: PC and projection equipment

for Powerpoint.

Steve Villano, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is the former head of Governor Mario M. Cuomo’s New

York City Press Office, with decades of experience in public service, public education, public health, and

as CEO of several national, non-profit organizations. As a key member of Cuomo’s staff during two

Presidential boomlets, Villano wrote Op-Ed pieces and worked on speeches that ranged from the First

Amendment, to immigration, race relations, affordable housing, higher education, nuclear power, the

environment, and ethnic stereotyping. His writing has appeared in mass circulation newspapers and

magazines such as The New York Times, Newsday, The Albany Times Union, The Rochester Democrat &

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Chronicle, the Suffolk Sun, the Napa Valley (CA.) Register Newspaper Group, the North Shore (Long

Island) Newspaper Group, Working Mother Magazine, Multichannel News, Cable Fax Daily, The Jewish

World, Associations Now Magazine, and Today’s Education. Villano has published professional articles

in the Federal Communications Law Journal, Free Speech (the Commission of Freedom of Speech,

Speech Communication Association of America), and in Contexts: A Forum for the Medical

Humanities (Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society). Villano has authored major pieces on

ethnic stereotyping in Ambassador Magazine, (the National Italian American Foundation’s 100,000

circulation magazine) about actors Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, and the HBO series “The Sopranos.” A

labor journalist for the National Education Association for a decade, Villano has written about censorship,

the rise of the Far Right in America and about sweatshop conditions at cap and gown factories in New

York. He developed a national Holocaust curriculum for classroom use while with the NEA, and a

curriculum on Ethics in the Workplace for Cornell University’s ILR School’s Labor Studies Program. His

writing has received numerous awards from the Educational Press Association of America, the Long

Island Press Club and the New York State Press Association, as well as a leadership award from the

Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health. Additionally, Villano’s digital poetry book, We, Haiku, an

interactive e-book of Haiku, received a QED (Quality, Excellence & Design Award) from the Digital

Book Publishers of America in 2014, and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Villano presently

lives in Northern California.

Robert Viscusi is Professor of English and executive officer of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at

Brooklyn College. The author of seven books and many scholarly articles, Viscusi has won an American

Book award for his novel Astoria, the Premio Giuseppe Acerbi for his book Buried Caesars and Other

Secrets of Italian American Writing, and the Brooklyn College Faculty Creative Writing Award for his

poem Ellis Island. Viscusi is the editor of the American edition of Francesco Durante’s anthology

Italoamericana: Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 (Fordham, 2014). Ellis Island is published

in English by Bordighera, New York, and in a bilingual Italian/English edition by abrigliasciolta editore,

Varese.

Jessica Whitehead is a PhD candidate at York University, and her dissertation explores the history of

cinema-going in Northeastern Ontario and the rise and decline of the Mascioli film circuit. Her research

has been featured in the Timmins Daily Press, Timmins Today, and CBC’s Up North radio show. She is

the recipient of the prestigious Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, has a recent

publication on movie star contests in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and several

forthcoming publications concentrating on the history of movie-going and exhibition in Canada.

Kathleen Zamboni McCormick will read from her novel, Dodging Satan: My Irish/Italian Sometimes

Awesome But Mostly Creepy Childhood (Sand Hill Review Press) which is a humorous, poignant coming-

of-age story set outside Boston in the 60s-70s. In it, Bridget Flaherty takes refuge in wacky

misunderstandings of Bible Stories and Catholic beliefs to avoid problems in her Irish/Italian family.

Kathy will be reading from a chapter in which Bridget and a friend, while chomping on a bubblegum

cigar, speculate on misogyny, the Garden of Eden, and God’s romantic life. The novel has won a 2017

Illumination Book Award—Bronze Medal in Catholic Books; 2017 ELit Award—Bronze Medal in

Humor; 2016 Foreword Indies Book of the Year, Finalist; 2016 Colorado Independent Publishers EVVY

Award—Gold Medal in Religion & Spirituality and Silver Medal in Humor.

Kathy is a professor of literature and writing at Purchase College, SUNY, and has written/edited seven

academic books, including The Culture of Reading and the Teaching of English which won the MLA’s

Mina Shaughnessy Award and with Edi Giunta, the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Italian American

Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.