Welcome to the Calandra Institute!

Welcome to the Calandra Institute!

Welcome to the home page of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute! As I near the completion of my fifth year of tenure as Dean, I am delighted at what the Institute has accomplished over these past four-plus years, and I continue to admire the dedication of many members of the Institute’s productive staff. 

 

I am happy to be able to state that we, as a group, have enjoyed much success and earned the accolades of many through the plethora of cultural and intellectual activities, as well as exhibitions, that the staff has organized, coordinated, and curated. Be they historical sheet music or photo exhibits, various bi-weekly activities the Institute organizes, the national and international symposia, film reviews, and research, and our TV program Italics, the Institute is surely situated close to if not at the center of the attention of many in the intellectual world of Italian America. This, to be sure, should be one of our goals: that the Institute be the intellectual point of encounter where new ideas and innovative modes of analysis are articulated and discussed. This, furthermore, should also take place on an international level, as the Institute is also the university-wide sponsor of the CUNY/Italy Exchange. 

 

Our cultural, demographic, and linguistic studies of these past three years have unearthed some new aspects of the Italian-American experience. I point to the publication of Sì, parliamo italiano, co-written by Vincenzo Milione and Christine Gambino. In a similar vein, Joseph Sciorra has worked diligently to re-launch The Italian American Review, a social science journal that is very much needed in our community. Within the creative realm, Fred Gardaphe, our Distinguished Professor, published a book of short stories in Italian and has a book forthcoming in 2011 entitled The Art of Reading Italian America. Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, co-edited also by Sciorra and yous is the Institute’s latest publication, a collection of essays that discuss both the production and representation of Italians on the silver screen. 

 

To be sure, much work still needs to be done, and our future activities will continue to explore the various sectors of our greater community, from the most local issues within CUNY to the more broad aspects of the Italian experience outside Italy, as we recently did during our roundtable “Human Migration in the Third Millennium,” with Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples and Italy’s Undersecretary of State Vincenzo Scotti. As we move forward, we will ensure that much of what we produce in the way of research and scholarship sees the light of day in venues such as journals and books, especially, since this is how we become part of the national and international discourse on ethnicity and other social and cultural issues. This shall figure as one of our main challenges. 

 

As mentioned above, the Institute continues to engage in its more local activities such as the research and analysis of the Italian-American experience both within The City University of New York as well as across the academic communities at large. The picture, in this regard, is not as rosy as one would want it. I am also hopeful that the Institute solidifies itself as a kind of “punto di ritrovo,” as we say in Italian, a meeting place for our CUNY paesani: Italians, Italian Americans, and all others interested in things “Italian”! We have made much progress since August 2006 in this regard, but not enough. We still need to work through our campus representatives at both the staff and professorial levels. 

 

This website ultimately brings together, in one place, information about our Institute’s activities and initiatives as well as those of other organizations within the greater Italian-American community. We have been working on a new website, and the challenges have been great, both technically and bureaucratically. We are hopeful that we can have a new look in the near future. We continue to move forward during what is still a period of transition, as it easily takes a minimum of five years to make the various modifications and changes in order to update and/or re-vamp, as required, any organization as complex as the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. 

 

We look forward to welcoming you to any and all of our unique cultural, social,

and historical programs.

 

Con i miei più cordiali saluti e arrivederci a presto!