From Ernest and Julio Gallo to Francis Ford Coppola, Italian Americans have shaped the history of California wine. But what role did a small group…

During the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini’s regime used propaganda to promote fascist Italian ideologies in Argentina. Although politically a failure, the attempt provoked a debate…

In the early twentieth century, U.S. recording companies began producing records of music from the traditions of various recent immigrant groups. These recordings included folk…

Folklorist Jocelyn Arem will speak about the life and legacy of Lena Spencer, the co-founder of Caffè Lena, the oldest surviving folk-music coffeehouse in the United States.…

Anthony Julian Tamburri’s volume Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) examines the current state of Italian-American…

Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880–1943, edited by Francesco Durante (Fordham University Press, 2014), brings to an English-speaking audience a definitive collection of…

Wednesday, October 29 The Watts Towers — a complex of multistoried structures decorated in pique assiette —   were created over the course of three decades…

Thursday, November 13 For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music.…

Monday, December 1 Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta’s edited collection, the first book to focus on an Italian-American woman writer, places Louise DeSalvo at the…

Alessandra Gissi, University of Naples “L’Orientale” The Fascist government’s 1938 anti-Semitic Racial Laws prompted a major migration of Italian intellectuals to the United States. While…