From the Field: Updates on Activities in Italian American Studies

Listed below are snippets about the people, mostly academics, who are searching for roots and branches of Italian ethnics in the
US .  I have determined to revive my compilation of tidbits about  recent professional developments and activities in Italian American Studies as part of this blog  ("Roots and Branches" )  Please submit to me by the 15th of each month  a 200 word carefully edited paragraph about your recent publications, public appearances, media productions, awards, promotions, grant projects,

etc.  Include email and other contact information in your paragraph.  You can also  include jpg images.  Please direct your snippets to me at [email protected].  I will compile the material for both the I-Italy blog and for distribution by the H-ItAm listserv.

Bobby Tanzilo's third book, Voci Piemontesi: Emigranti piemontesi negli Stati Uniti attraverso le loro parole is published by Edizioni dell'Orso (
Alessandria) in February with the support of the Regione Piemonte / Assessorato al Welfare, Lavoro, Immigrazione ed Emigrazione.   Contact him at  Monferrini in
America,

<[email protected]>,   http://www.monferrini.com


 

Dominique Padurano   presented a lecture “Charles Atlas’ Italian Nose: Trials of Ethnic Masculinity at the Federal Trade Commission, 1936” at
Hofstra University, October 2008.  He upcoming publication is  Dear Friend: Charles Atlas, American Masculinity, and the Bodybuilding Testimonial, 1894-1944,” Imitation, Influence, and Advertising in the American Marketplace, Palgrave-Macmillan (forthcoming). [email protected]

Fr. Vincent A. LAPOMARDA’s  THE JESUITS AND THE THIRD REICH (Edwin Mellen Press, 2nd ed.,  2005) was translated into Italian by Dr. Antonino LoNardo of
Palermo, Italy, and published this past July.  Below is the advertisement.

 Prezzo di vendita € 38,50 Libro STORIA 508 pagineCopertina Sovracoperta - Formato 15x23 - bianco e nero. Il libro descrive le persecuzioni naziste subite dalla Compagnia di Gesù durante il Terzo Reich e il destino infausto di molti gesuiti in Germania, Austria, Cecoslovacchia, Polonia, Stati Baltici, Russia, Romania, Ungheria, Yugoslavia, Italia, Paesi Bassi e Francia. Il volume
del prof. Lapomarda evidenzia, anche, gli sforzi profusi dai gesuiti in difesa dei diritti umani, in particolare di quelli degli Ebrei e fornisce una minuziosa testimonianza sul comportamento di un preminente ordine della Chiesa Cattolica durante il nazismo. Con una semplice richiesta (e con prova dell’acquisto) a [email protected] verrà inviato – via mail o su CD (con spese di spedizione a carico
del richiedente) il volume in formato elettronico (file pdf). [email protected]

Joanna Clapps Herman has recently co-edited Wild Dreams: The Best of

Italian
Americana, published by Fordham University Press. She is the winner for 2008 of the Chase Award for Literary Excellence, Keynote Speaker and Honeree of The Annual Litchfield Review Writers Conference, Fall 2008. She was interviewed on Here on Earth, on Wisconsin Public Radio on Dec.1, 2008. This show can be heard at
www.wpr.org/hereonearth/podcast/hereonearth081201k.mp3). She was the

facilitator at the
Tenement Museum discussion on Oct. 23, 2008.  She will be a featured reader at Smalls, January 31, 2009. Reading at the Casa Italiana, NYU, March 13, 2009. A reader at
Tenement Museum May 7, 2009. Her essay"My Homer," will be included in Dr. Luisa Del Giudice's collection, Speaking Memory, Palgrave Publishers, to be published October 2009. Her poem, "My Italian Father Gives Birth," is forthcoming in Feile-Festa.  [email protected].

Phylis Martinelli  <[email protected]>  is preparing a new course on Ethnic Identity, which was the subject of her dissertation on Italian American transplants in the 1980s to
Arizona.  The new course will examine post modern ideas on ethnicity, explore the myriad ways it influences our lives, and have a real time research component for students to query how their peers see their own ethnicity (or lack thereof.)"
St.Mary'sCalifornia

Judith Pistacchio Bessette, a long-time member of the American Italian Historical Association, has recently completed a DVD with the Dracut (MA) Access TV Cable Station. The DVD is composed of original photographs and paper documents related to the history of the historic textile mill
village of
Lymansville in the Town of North Providence, Rhode Island.   

The history of the village is illustrated through visuals from the period of 1809 when the first textile mill in the village was founded (Lyman Cotton Manufacturing Company), to the 1960s when the second textile mill in the village closed (Lymansville Wool Manufacturing Company).  

The DVD focuses on the textile industry in the village and the Italian and Italian Americans who worked in the textile mills located along the
Woonasquatucket River. Other areas include immigration; education; religious institutions and politics. Many of the immigrants emigrated from small mountaintop villages in the northeast corner of
Campania including Ciorlano, Valle Agricola, Fonte Greca and Pratella.   [email protected]

 Blossom_Kirschenbaum [email protected] ----The Journal of  Italian Translation’s  latest issue (3:2, Fall 2008) carried, bilingually, her translation of “Una Rosa Rossa”/ “A Red Rose,” a story by Stefano Benni, from his most recent collection La grammatica di Dio.  (she had previously published Benni’s "Sigismondo e Vittorina," from Bar Sport Duemila, in
Chelsea 66, 1999.)  Benni’s satirical fiction has been translated into over thirty national and regional languages, even though his work abounds in verbal pyrotechnics, neologisms, topical jokes, puns, and slang--for he is a poet, blending fantasy, pop culture, literary borrowings, and tomorrow’s headlines.  Two of his novels are now available in English through Europa Editions and have drawn favorable reviews: Margherita Dolcevita (political satire in the guise of teen fantasy) and Saltatempo (Timeskipper in English).  Thanks to the kindness of Professor Oldcorn, I now have a copy of Benni’s latest work, out in November 2008, Miss Galassia.  Also I bask in the glow of acceptance by  Professor Luigi Bonaffini of
Brooklyn College/ CUNY, editor of the Journal of Italian Translation,  whose own awards include the 2005 National Translation Prize, and whose trilingual anthologies help preserve and widen audiences for dialect literature.

Marisa Labozzetta [email protected] has recently published in two online journals, American Fiction and Perigee.  The story, “A Pretty Face” is presently online at www.perigee-art.com.  In October, 2008, she read from her latest collection of short stories, At the Copa, at the John D. Calandra Institute. A review can be found in the November 2 issue of Oggi.  A reading from a collection of connected short stories in progress was given at the American Italian Historical Association Conference at Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven, Connecticut. To learn more visit  www.marisalabozzetta.com