The Italian American Think Tank
This is the short "Events" description for the section header
Tom Smith After a sensational trial, eleven Italian Americans acquitted in the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy were killed in the largest…
Rosetta Giuliani-Caponetto, University of Connecticut In 2006, Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi proclaimed, “We don’t want Italy to become a multiethnic, multicultural country. We are…
Andrew Alpern When Rosario Candela (1890-1953) left Palermo to come to America with his father, he was an 18-year-old laborer with virtually no knowledge of…
Laura Cook Kenna, George Washington University Since at least the 1950s, some Italian Americans have organized anti-defamation campaigns to respond to unflattering, often mafia-inflected, representations…
Christopher Wilson, Boston College In 1995, New York writer Lorenzo Carcaterra stunned audiences with a memoir entitled Sleepers, which told the story of the author…
Mary Gibson, John Jay College Cesare Lombroso is widely-known as the “father of criminology,” but the Italian context of his life and thought is generally…
Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology .The Italian “diva film” of the silent era provided a forum for denouncing social evils and exploring new…
Yiorgos Kalogeras, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Yiorgos Kalogeras will discuss how Elia Kazan’s America-America (1963) serves as an archetype for two recent films dealing with…
Kimberly Sims, American University The idea that there is a similarity between Italian-American and African-American criminality dates back to the late nineteenth century and persists…
Jennifer Guglielmo, Smith College At the turn of the twentieth century, Italian Americans led and participated in some of the period’s most volatile labor strikes.…
Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University Mary Jo Bona, author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (SUNY Press,…
William Issel, San Francisco State University William Issel, author of For Both Cross and Flag: Catholic Action, Anti-Catholicism, and National Security Politics in World War…