Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he teaches courses in Italian, Italian American, Film, Jewish, and Gender Studies. He is the author of Divergenze in celluloide: colore, migrazione e identità sessuale nei film gay di Ferzan Ozpetek (Celluloid Divergences: Color, Migration, and Sexual Identity in the Gay Series of Ferzan Ozpetek) with Mimesis editore and Pasolini’s Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros, and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (2017). His research interests include the integration of gender, class, and migration in both Italian and Italian American literature and cinema. He has recently been awarded one of four Fulbright Awards for the Foundation of the South to conduct research and teach at the University of Calabria, Arcavacata for the Spring of 2017, where he taught a course entitled “Queering Gay Italian Americana.” Currently, he is working on two, authored book-length projects, one exploring the Italian-American gay author, Robert Ferro, who died of AIDS complications in 1988 and the second on the Algerian-Italian author, Amara Lakhous.
Calabretta-Sajder is the Director of Communication for the American Association of Teachers of Italian, the President of Gamma Kappa Alpha, the National Italian Honors Society, and an Executive Committee member of the Italian American Studies Association.
As member of IASA’s Executive Council (2016-Present), Calabretta-Sajder has served on the Scholarship Committee, Conference Committee, Constitution Committee, and is currently chairing the Elections Committee. In June 2017, he chaired the “Theorizing the Italian Diaspora” Symposium committee, which boasted an attendance of over 60 colleagues from five countries, hosting both workshops and traditional sessions, and two keynotes presentations. He is also working on the proposal to relaunch the IASA journal.
If elected Vice President, he will be working hard to
- expand membership and cross-pollinate membership from similar academic organizations (in particular American Association of Teachers of Italian, Modern Language Association, Society of Cinema and Media Studies)
- build a more international ‘face’ of the organization through conferences/symposiums both nationally and internationally
- introduce graduate students to the organization