This year's conference features scholarly and creative presentations and panels focused on the broad theme of the conference: the nature, history, dynamics, and problematics of an Italian American system of values—current and historical, perceived or imagined, personal or social.

Present-day Italian American identities are often grounded in systems of values and beliefs emergent from transnational histories. Family structure, religion, state politics, economics, social class, and the experience of migration itself shape these systems of value, which finds expression in personal and communal behavior, expressive, and material culture, and forms of social life, from the family to the larger communities. The persistent American concern with values and ethics in U. S. society has, since the earliest Italian immigration, continued to raise questions about the nature of Italian American and other "ethnic" values in U. S. society.

Download the 2015 Conference Program