Calandra Institute

Italics: A View from the Bridge and Calandra Celebrates 40 Years!
2019-10-20 18:30 - 19:00, 2019-10-19 07:30 - 08:00, 2019-10-16 15:30 - 16:00, 2019-10-16 10:30 - 11:00, 2019-10-08 21:30 - 22:00 (America/New_York)
On this episode Dr. Joseph Sciorra interviews Claire Beckman, the producing artistic director and lead actress in A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller’s play that revolves around an Italian American family. It premiered at New York’s Coronet Theatre in 1955.
The play returned recently to Red Hook, where the action is set, in the Brave New World Repertory Theatre production, which had its run at the Waterfront Museum barge from September 12 to October 6, 2019.
Next, we will take you to the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. On Thursday, September 19, 2019, more than eighty people gathered for dinner to celebrate forty years of service, research, and outreach from the world’s premier Italian American and diaspora institute.
Watch on YouTube here.
Italics is broadcast at the following times: the second Tuesday of every month at 9:30pm; the following Wednesday at 10:30am and 3:30pm; the following Saturday at 7:30am; and the following Sunday at 6:30pm.
CUNY TV is available on cable in the five boroughs of New York City – on Ch. 75 (Spectrum and Cablevision/Optimum Brooklyn), Ch. 77 (RCN Cable) and Ch. 30 (Verizon FiOS).
Italics, Television for the Italian American Experience, is a monthly presentation in the CUNY Presents time slot that features prominent Italian Americans in the arts, business, government, sports, academia, and more. Each episode explores various aspects of the Italian diaspora, Italian American history and traditions, contemporary Italian American life, and takes a projected look at the future of the Italian American community.
Italics is hosted by Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College/CUNY and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures.
Italics is now in its third decade serving the Italian-American community and those interested in Italian American history and culture. Italics is co-produced in collaboration with the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.
Watch more at http://tv.cuny.edu/show/italics
Subscribe to the Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/2VfN4uF
Subscribe to the CUNY TV channel: https://bit.ly/2GmGb13

Language Teaching Development Workshop
2019-10-18 10:00 - 16:00
Language Teaching Development Workshop: CLIL, Content and Language Integrated Learning
La stoffa dell’Italia: Leonardo, l’arte, e la scienza del tessile e della moda.
The Fabric of Italy: Leonardo, Art, and the Science of Textile and Fashion.
“Fabric is to fashion what words are to language.”
Development Workshop for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), organized by Professor Eugenia Paulicelli, Queens College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York.
The workshop is co-sponsored by the Italian Program at Queens College, the Calandra Institute, the Italian American Committee on Education the Center for Teaching and Learning at Queens College, Fashion Studies at the Graduate Center/The Fabric of Cultures Project, the Italian Cultural Institute and the Italian Consulate in New York. Taking inspiration from the many celebrations that are honoring the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, this workshop will illustrate CLIL methodologies to scaffold content-based language teaching. In particular, the workshop will explore a little-known area of Leonardo’s oeuvre: his study of textiles and fashion. To this very day, these topics are central to the image of Italy, to its culture and its economy, as the world of fashion connects the realms of art, industry, creativity, manufacturing, and craftsmanship. The workshop will begin with sessions on the subjects of Leonardo and CLIL methodology in English, and later will engage participants in hands-on laboratories with a variety of modules— in Italian—focused on the theme of the day and on classroom activities at the middle school and high school level. Teachers will receive a certificate of attendance at the end of the workshop.
Speakers will include: Prof. Carmel Coonan (Ca’ Foscari, Venice); Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY); Prof. Annavaleria Guazzieri (Director of Education, Italian Consulate in NY); Prof. Nicola Lucchi (Queens College).
To RSVP: Go to https://forms.gle/2y61tWiFLDSAEVGc7
This event is cosponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute and the Società Dante Alighieri, New York.

Presentation of Social Notebooks: The Postalmarket.it Case
2019-10-17 15:30 - 16:30
Quaderni Social is an editorial project conceived by the journalist Massimo Lucidi that emphasizes the opportunities of the web, ranging from the origins of an Italian “Amazon” platform all the way to how to articulate one’s relationship with social media.
Postalmarket.it is the first of these stories. Eugenio Filograna is the enlightened entrepreneur who had aimed to relaunch the glorious Postalmarket brand, leader in mail order sales in Italy. In 2000, the company found itself in difficult straits relaunching the network and suffering delays and management contradictions. It could have been Amazon before Amazon had it not run into these sticky problems. An incredible story. Italy is filled with enterprising people with extraordinary talents. But can those people team up? Does the rule of law offer opportunities or feed doubts and uncertainties?
The protagonists of this story will be here to talk about what happened and about web initiatives involving Italy going forward into the future.

The New Reputation of "Made in Italy"
2019-10-17 14:30 - 15:30
The Associazione Mezzogiorno Futuro (Asmef) and the Italian Excellence Award Meet the Istituto Commercio Estivo to acknowledge stand-out Italian companies.
Representatives from ASMEF and from the Istituto Commercio Estivo will meet with leaders of noted companies to recognize the companies’ remarkable contributions to the new “Made in Italy.”
Luigino Belloni, director general of Malo Moda, and representatives of the company Angelo Bervicato will be awarded the Premio Eccellena Italiana prize. Calandra Dean Anthony Tamburri will host and preside over a round-table discussion about aspirations and needs as well as future outlooks of Italian businesses and corporations vis-a-vis the United States and other nations. Italy loves the image of a mobile lifestyle, and the constantly moving and changing Italian communities abroad are its natural ambassadors.
For more information about these organizations and the prize, go to www.asmef.it and to www.premioeccellenzaitaliana.it.

Book Presentation and Discussion--Cesare Pavese's Long Journey: A Critical-Analytical Study
2019-10-16 18:00 - 20:00
Novelist, poet, essayist, and professor Giose Rimanelli published a number of articles on Cesare Pavese’s work. Over time, he cobbled these essays and others into a book on the opera omnia of Pavese. Left unpublished, the book now appears in print thanks to Professor Mark Pietralunga, who edited the volume, and Bordighera Press, which has published other books by Giose Rimanelli, including the first reprint of his strident critique of Italy’s mid-twentieth-century literary circle, Il mestiere del furbo.
Mark Pietralunga and others will be present to discuss this and other works by Giose Rimanelli. Moderated by Anthony Julian Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.

Guido Culture and Italian American Youth: From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore CANCELED
2019-10-02 18:00 - 20:00
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED
Donald Tricarico, Queensborough Community College, CUNY
From Saturday Night Fever to Jersey Shore, Italian American youth in New York City have appropriated—and been appropriated by—popular American culture. In Guido Culture and Italian American Youth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Donald Tricarico investigates how Italian ethnicity has been used to fashion Guido as a distinct youth style that signals inclusion in popular American culture and, simultaneously, the making of a new ethnic subject. The concept of Guido emerged from a wave of Italian immigration after World War II in outer-borough neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst, and its story is an Italian American one, symbolizing the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity within American society. Tricarico takes up questions about the definition of Guido, the role of disco, and the identity politics of Jersey Shore in order to reconsider the significance of this youth culture for the study of Italian ethnicity.

Three Bordighera Press Writers— Kathy Curto, Maria Terrone, and Rita Esposito Watson—Read from Their Works
2019-09-24 18:00 - 20:00
Kathy Curto’s memoir Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood (2018) is her exploration of identity that “takes on the beauty, pain, tenderness, cruelty, passion, and love that often coexist in a jumble of childhood and family” (Ann Imig). Maria Terrone’s collection of essays At Home in the World (2018) uses attentive observation and humor to explore her many intellectual and writerly concerns, among them the passage of time and her Sicilian roots. Rita Esposito Watson in Italian Kisses: Rose-Colored Words and Love from the Old Country (2019) focuses on a grandmother’s life story and weaves in memories and traditions that resonate across cultures.

Goombarooch Resignified: Artist Talk with John Avelluto and Exhibition Curator Joseph Sciorra
2019-08-12 18:00 - 19:30
Join visual artist John Avelluto and curator Joseph Sciorra for a lively discussion around ideas and issues based on the Calandra Institute’s exhibit “Goombarooch Resignified.” The exhibition will be on view until September 13, 2019.
This event is free, open to the public, and held at the Calandra Institute. Light refreshments served.
RSVP by calling (212) 642-2094.

Italics: John Avelluto and Goombarooch Resignified
2019-06-16 18:30 - 19:00, 2019-06-15 07:30 - 08:00, 2019-06-12 15:30 - 16:00, 2019-06-12 10:30 - 11:00
This month our guest is John Avelluto, a visual artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and who still works there. Avelluto’s work revels in mash-ups of images, products, and ideas where Italy and the United States converge. His multi-media work plays with Italian American culture and the existing linguistic and visual repertoire of references that have gone largely underappreciated and unexamined. It stands at a crossroads of what in Italian is referred to as contaminazione, moments and places where ideas and idioms collide across ever-shifting borders. As part of the artistic process, Avelluto employs a time-consuming method of layering numerous coats of acrylic paint to create strata of simulacrum imitating salami slices, dripping pizza, and other items that he augments and then applies to a flat surface.
His new exhibition at the Calandra Institute, titled Goombarooch Resignified and curated by Calandra’s Joseph Sciorra, opened on May 7 and runs through September 13, 2019.

Marisa Frasca's Wild Fennel: Poems and Other Stories
2019-05-23 18:00 - 20:00
“In poems born of the rocky soil of the old country, where children learn to sew in a ‘walled-in garden’ with ‘one potted plant-crown of thorns,’ Frasca threads history and myth. She tells of immigrant hope that turns quickly to devastating loss and makes exile real—the self in search of the self. Writing to her counterpart, Anna, who dies young back in Sicily, and carrying her father’s ghost, time feels endless, simultaneous. But Frasca is also a poet of wonder, and this work is alive, visionary, painterly. Here myth isn’t an old story, it is the art of transformation, and Frasca embodies an ever-present unfolding.”—Anne Marie Macari
“Frasca threads through memories wary of the ways nostalgia scars, seeking antidotes by turning writing into a ‘battledress,’ and crafting introspection into a means of saving us ‘from our ugly stink.’ Enter Wild Fennel’s ‘feral fires’ and you will emerge both bruised and blessed.”—Mihaela Moscaliuc
Marisa Frasca is the author of Via Incanto: Poems from the Darkroom. Frasca holds a BA in creative writing from The New School and an MFA in poetry from Drew University. Her poems and translations have been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She serves on the Advisory Board of Arba Sicula, a nonprofit organization that preserves and disseminates the Sicilian language, literature, and folklore.

Italics: NIAF Annual Gala and NOIAW Luncheon 2019
2019-05-19 18:30 - 19:00, 2019-05-18 07:30 - 08:00, 2019-05-15 15:30 - 16:00, 2019-05-15 10:00 - 10:30, 2019-05-14 21:30 - 22:00
This episode of Italics takes us to Cipriani 42nd Street for the National Italian American Foundation’s 2019 New York Gala and to the St. Regis New York for the National Organization of Italian American Women’s Annual Luncheon.

Italics goes on the red carpet at Cipriani 42nd Street to talk with NIAF Gala
honorees Ret. Judge Frank M. Ciuffani; Lorenzo Zurino, CEO of The One Company; and Marylou Delfino Berk, Senior Managing Director/Head of Commercial Real Estate at LeFrak Organization, Inc.

Then we go to the St. Regis New York hotel and talk to NOIAW honorees Sandra L. DePoalo, Global Head of Anti-Money Laundering for BNY Mellon; Dr. Judith A. Salerno, President of the New York Academy of Medicine; as well as to staff members of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, which was honored with the Friend of NOIAW Award.

Italics airs at the following times:

Tuesday, May 14 – 9:30 pm
Wednesday, May 15 – 10:30 am, 3:30 pm
Saturday, May 18 – 7:30 am
Sunday, May 19 – 6:30 pm

Symposium: Between Acceptance and Prejudice: One Hundred Years of Italian E/i[m]migration
2019-05-15 17:30 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
The Comitato Società Dante Alighieri NYC invites you to the symposium Between Acceptance and Prejudice: One Hundred Years of Italian E/i[m]migration. This symposium takes its title from the Italian collection of essays Tra accoglienza e pregiudizio: Emigrazione e immigrazione nella storia dell’ultimo secolo: da Sacco e Vanzetti a Jerry Essan Masslo (2018) edited by Giovanni Cerchia and sponsored by the Fondazione Giorgio Amendola and the Associazione Lucana Carlo Levi. The program will consist of presentations by four authors from the book as well as others by area scholars, dealing with the theme of migration to and from Italy and its legacy today. Some presentations may be in Italian.

Opening Comments: Domenico Cerabona, Luigi Morgante, Anthony Julian Tamburri.

Speakers include: Giovanni Cerchia, Augusto Ferraiuolo, Eugenio Marino, Vito Antonio Leuzzi, together with Marcella Bencivenni, Fred Gardaphé, Fraser Ottanelli, Joseph Sciorra, and Mary Anne Trasciatti.

Moderator: Donna Chirico

Cosponsored by the Fondazione Giorgio Amendola, the Associazione Lucana Carlo Levi, and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY.

Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies
2019-05-09 18:00 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Teresa Fiore
Montclair State University
By examining Italy’s long history of worldwide emigration in light of the country’s own colonial legacies and the contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, Pre-Occupied Spaces (Fordham University Press, 2017) poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging in our age of demographic mobility. It also advocates for re-designing the discipline of Italian Studies within a mobility-based and translingual vision. Through an interdisciplinary approach attentive to cultural texts addressing travel, living, and spaces, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may dispel preoccupation around migrations and hold useful lessons about inclusiveness for the present. The book received the 2017 AAIS Book Prize and an Honorable Mention in the 2018 MLA competition for the Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian Literature.

Exhibition Opening of Goombarooch Resignified: Works by John Avelluto
2019-05-07 18:00 - 20:00
Visual artist John Avelluto revels in mash-ups of sounds, images, products, and ideas where Italy and the United States converge. His multimedia work plays with Italian American culture and the existing linguistic and visual repertoire of vernacular references that have gone underappreciated and unexamined. It stands at a crossroads of what in Italian is referred to as contaminazione, those hybrid moments and places where ideas and idioms collide across ever-shifting borders to create innovative articulations. As part of the artistic process, this Brooklyn-born and raised artist employs a time-consuming method of layering numerous coats of acrylic paint to create strata of simulacrum imitating salami slices, dripping pizza, and other items that he augments and then applies to a flat surface.
On view May 7–September 13, 2019
GALLERY HOURS: MONDAY–FRIDAY, 9AM–5PM
Exhibition Opening: Tuesday, May 7, 2019, 6pm
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EXHIBITION CATALOG.

The Legacy of Louise DeSalvo
2019-05-02 18:00 - 20:00
In 1996, Louise DeSalvo, acclaimed modernist scholar and Virginia Woolf biographer, published the memoir Vertigo, “the unlikely narrative of how a working-class Italian American girl became a critic and writer.” Almost ten years earlier, DeSalvo’s novel Casting Off had come out in England because U.S. publishers did not believe that suburban women “do adultery” (the novel was reprinted in the United States by Bordighera Press). DeSalvo went on to write several books of memoir and essays and two books exploring the process and craft of writing, thus producing a body of work that stands out not only in the Italian American canon but also in the memoir tradition.
Whether writing about working-class identity, the racialization of Southern Italian immigrants, domestic abuse, or the roots of illness, DeSalvo spoke her truth—by turns blunt and lyrical, always unapologetic. She taught her students to do the same, both at Hunter College, where she was Jenny Hunter Endowed Scholar for Creative Writing and Literature, and through her books, which have garnered a large and devoted following of readers. DeSalvo died of metastatic breast cancer on October 31, 2018. In the wake of her death, scholars, writers, teachers, and publishers will gather to remember her and reflect on her legacy.
Moderator:
Edvige Giunta, New Jersey City University
Panelists:
Rosemary Ahern, Editor
Mary Jo Bona, Stony Brook University
Nancy Caronia, West Virginia University
Fredric Nachbaur, Fordham University Press
Stanislao Pugliese, Hofstra University
Jennifer Romanello, Pace University
Julija Šukys, University of Missouri
Anthony J. Tamburri, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute
If you cannot attend in person, the event will be livestreamed, and you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUNYNTIzSKs.

Annual Conference: Eye-Centricity and the Visual Cultures of Italy and Its Diaspora
2019-04-26 08:00 - 2019-04-27 18:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
This interdisciplinary conference proposes to explore the visual cultures Italians have created, consumed, and been the subject of from early modernity to the contemporary “post-text” era. Italians—including inhabitants of the nation-state, members of the diaspora, and former colonial subjects—have been conceptualized, rendered, and understood to a large degree by the visual. Landscapes (e.g., Roman ruins, the “old neighborhood”), individuals (e.g., the picturesque contadina, the criminalized immigrant), objects (e.g., fascist architecture in Asmara, pizza), and cultural concepts (e.g., bella figura, the evil eye) have been the stuff of visual arts, media, advertisement, tourism, and vernacular renderings concerning Italy’s histories and identities, within and beyond the country’s geopolitical boundaries. These and other visual frames are didactic modes by which tropes of Italy and Italians are promoted and consumed, contested and re-imagined.
To read the entire conference program (subject to change), please click here.

Screening of Pizza Shop: An Italian-American Dream
2019-04-16 19:00 - 20:00 | Swinging Sixties Senior Center, 211 Ainslie Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Pizza Shop: An Italian-American Dream (2017), 57 minutes
Antony Osso, dir.
Pizza Shop features brothers Carmine (Charlie) and Fiore (Fred) Osso, who emigrated from Belmonte Calabro (Cosenza province) Calabria, in the mid-1960s. For more than forty years, they have run the successful Rudy’s Ristorante & Pizzeria, a family-friendly eatery in Closter, New Jersey. Charlie is the serious and detail-oriented manager, while Fred is the jovial and passionate chef. In their seventies, they are facing relocation and the construction of a new restaurant. Director Antony Osso—Charlie’s son—explores in this film the many ways a local business, established and nurtured by post-World War II immigrants, can serve as a hub for a community.
Co-sponsored by the St. Nick’s Alliance.
Swinging Sixties Senior Citizen Center
211 Ainslie Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965
2019-04-11 18:00 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Danielle Battisti
University of Nebraska–Omaha
In Whom We Shall Welcome (Fordham University Press, 2019), Danielle Battisti examines post–World War II immigration by Italians to the United States. The book looks at efforts by Italian American organizations to foster Italian immigration along with the lobbying efforts of others in the community to change the quota laws. While Italian Americans (and other white ethnics) had attained virtual political and social equality with many other ethnic populations by the end of the war, Italians nonetheless continued to be classified as undesirable immigrants. Battisti’s work is an important contribution toward understanding the construction of Italian American racial/ethnic identity in this period, the role of ethnic groups in U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, and the history of the liberal immigration-reform movement that led to the 1965 Immigration Act. Whom We Shall Welcome makes significant contributions to histories of migration and ethnicity, post–World War II liberalism, and immigration policy.

Third Annual Evening of Poetry
2019-04-05 18:00 - 20:00
To commemorate National Poetry Month, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, and the journal Italian Americana are hosting their third annual evening of poetry. The night will highlight fifteen poets from the two respective journals, including featured poets Daniela Gioseffi and Judith Vollmer.
