IASA Executive Council (2022 - 2024)

Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen is Professor of English and Chair of the Language and Literature Department at State College of Florida. She earned her doctorate in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on “Inter-Colonialism: On-screen Representations of Italian-Americans.” She has published on Poe, Pound, and Lupino and various topics on Italian Americana. She has been a member of IASA since 2009 and has consistently attended IASA conferences presenting her work.

In 2017 she unofficially assisted the organization by reorganizing the platform, Submittable, used by the Association to manage conference and journal submissions. She supported the Chicago conference committee with logistics pertaining to submissions and speaker biographies. She co-edited Theorizing the Italian Diaspora, selected essays from the Calabria Symposium and worked with the publisher in printing and mailing the volume to members.

In 2018 Ruffner Grieneisen joined the IASA team as VP of Communications and Marketing and took on the Webmaster job. Ruffner Grieneisen has worked diligently in keeping the website up to date while accomplishing a variety of additional goals as VP of CAM:
 

• Grew membership to 200 paying members when our membership took a hit at 141 in 2020 due to Covid. 

• Started a Webinar Series to maintain a connection with members during Covid. (We are on our 21st of 24 Webinars in the series.) 

• Streamlined our web page and is liaison between the University of Illinois Press and IASA for membership and journal upkeep. 

• Administered our conference submission system and obtained a credit card reader from our PayPal associates to take on-the-spot payments for conference registration, membership, and book sales in the US and Italy. 

As the next IASA President, she would like to complete three main goals while continuing to promote and grow the organization by reaching out to programs that house Italian and Italian American Studies at their institutions: She would like to continue her goal of capturing interviews with all living past IASA presidents for our archives; she would like to launch a series of Italian American Author Pamphlets for professors and students use who reside in America and in Italy; and she would like to write a grant that would provide funding to build a digital concordance archival system for our proceedings, webinars, interviews, photos, and keynote speeches.

I received an M.A. at Bryn Mawr College in Classical Studies and an M.A. in Art History, as well as a museum curator certificate, from Rutgers University.  For the past twenty years I have been an adjunct lecturer in the Classics department at Brooklyn College, CUNY, teaching classes in literature, culture, gender studies and history as well as Greek and Latin roots in the English language.  During conferences at both IASA and the Calandra Institute, I have given papers including, “Tattoos: Italians and Italianita”, “Sports as a Vehicle for Acculturation and Civic Identity” and “The Male Gaze: Portraits of Women in Renaissance Italy.” 

Although JoAnn Delmonico Luhrs does not teach Italian language or culture, she has over the years been an avid researcher in a variety of fields in Italian American culture, including history, sports, and art to name a few.  Being a member of the John D. Calandra Institute over the past many years has afforded her the opportunity to give presentations in a variety of subjects and to be a member in the audience to many others. Additionally, she attended the program at the University of Calabria in 2017 to study the Italian Diaspora and, as a result, wrote a memoir of my family’s own immigration to America from Calabria. While there, she was introduced to members of IASA since a conference was going on. She found the conference and papers so interesting that they impelled me to decide there and then to join IASA as a member. Now, whenever time allows from my own teaching, I attend conferences at both the Calandra and IASA and she has to say she has not missed a program since then. She has been lucky enough to be able to give presentations at many of the conferences myself. If she were given the opportunity to work on the board of the Italian American Studies Association, she could be an asset to continuing the great work that IASA does and the scholarship it perpetuates through conferences.

Joanne L. DeTore, Ph.D. has been a member of IASA since 2010 and was a member of the EC from 2012-2018 and then again from 2020-2021. During her tenure on the EC, she grew an online presence for IASA from 75 followers to over 1,000 followers on FB, in addition to creating much more of a presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. She also encouraged the use of  Submittable for conference submissions to streamline the process. She has served on several conference committees to select papers and group sessions, served as a session chair, helped with logistics at conferences, and served on the membership and fundraising committees. 

An Associate Professor of Humanities and Communication and Interim Associate Chair at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, she created the first Italian American film course. Her creative and scholarly work focuses on her Italian American heritage has been published in Voices in Italian Americana, Italian Americana, Review Americana: A Literary Journal, and in the books, Anti-Italianism: Essays on Prejudice; Fractured Feminisms: Rhetoric, Context, and Contestation; Joy, Interrupted and Sweet Lemons: Writing with a Sicilian Accent. She is working on a full-length book of poetry exploring her IA heritage. 
 

A successful grant writer, DeTore has brought in over $700,000 in grants as a PI or Co-PI, and will be using her grant-writing skills to help with fundraising. DeTore also teaches her university’s public relations courses & is working on a graduate certificate from Harvard University in Museum Studies, fields that can assist IASA in its promotion and marketing. In addition, DeTore is a certified diversity trainer and a national award-winning Diversity and Inclusion Director who can assist IASA in their diversity efforts as well.
 

DeTore would like to assist in growing IASA membership, especially among younger scholars by promoting IASA at other conferences like the Popular Culture Conference, for instance.   She feels it is critical to foster Italian American scholarship as well as creative work that explores the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender expression, and sexuality in the Italian diaspora.

Lisa Paolucci is an assistant professor of Education at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She recently received her Ph.D. in English Education from Columbia University, where she completed research on Italian American teachers in New York City public schools and their pathways to teaching. She is currently researching preservice teachers’ beliefs and attitudes about race and ethnicity with a focus on Italian American undergraduate students. She previously served on the Executive Council of the Italian American Studies Association from 2015-2016, and is a previous Board Member of the Italian American Writers Association. Formerly, Dr. Paolucci taught high school English in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her poems have been published in Ovunque Siamo, #me too, anch'io (2020), and Literary Vegan.  

Particularly relevant to the role of Vice President of Communications and Marketing is her extensive administrative experience. As the former Program Coordinator of the Education Department at St. Francis College, she has successfully navigated various databases and digital resources, thus demonstrating her familiarity with learning new systems. In addition, she served as the primary liaison between students, faculty, administration, the public, and the Department, and can therefore demonstrate a level of comfort and success at communicating with various parties on behalf of an organization.

Colleen Ryan is professor of Italian at Indiana University, where she teaches a range of courses in contemporary Italian film, literature, and theater studies as well as Italian American and Italian diaspora studies and foreign language pedagogy. She also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies of Italian and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer for her department. Since joining the association in 2015, she has been actively partaking in all of IASA’s national and international conferences, presenting on research panels and round tables on curriculum development and teaching. For the last three years she has served as IASA’s secretary and has learned a great deal about the association’s history, membership, executive team, the current future vision, and the social and intellectual responsibilities. She very much enjoys the work and being part of the leadership team that fosters IASA’s keenly interdisciplinary profile and top-notch professionalism. In her view, IASA plays a pivotal role in the shaping of ethnicity focused humanities scholarship and education, and it would be an honor and pleasure for her to both continue and expand her role within the Association’s leadership team. She is committed to the punctual and accurate reporting of all association business to the membership and to collaborating with IASA’s  officers and membership to foster clear and effective Communication.

Dr. Donna Chirico is Professor of Psychology at York College/CUNY and holds the position of Resident Faculty at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. Her field research in India studying moral and spiritual development constitutes the foundation for her ongoing research program exploring the nature of imagination as it relates to aspects of psychological development. One implication is the role of the imaginative process in educational attainment among Americans of Italian heritage. The objective of this work is to understand the function of transcendent imagination in personal development, attainment of valued goals and general well-being. In a second major project, matters of personal identity formation are being explored to achieve an understanding of how ethnic identity contributes to the psychological development of the self. She has published numerous papers on these topics and is a sought-after speaker on these matters vital to the Italian American community. Dr. Chirico is also an expert in the application of statistical analysis in sports where she explores the use of statistical paradigms in sports betting and choices made by fantasy sports league participants.

Dr. Chirico is the Chair its Italian American Faculty Staff Advisory Council to John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, is Treasurer on the Executive Committee of IASA, serves as Secretary on the Board of the National Organization of Italian American Women, and is president of the American arm of the Italian Language Inter-Cultural Alliance. Here are just two of the goals she has in mind as IASA Treasurer:

1. Evaluate the investments and resources of IASA to determine how best to provide future financial stability, and,

2. Increase the revenues of IASA by seeking collaborative partnership for its endeavors such as conferences and symposia.

Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Auburn University. Her areas of academic interests include Italy’s colonialism in East Africa; studies on nostalgia; Italian American diaspora; food movements and activism; philanthropy studies. She is currently researching a book-length project on Italian-American farming traditions in the Southern states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A preliminary study on this topic is her article “From Garden to Table. Cultivating Southern Hospitality through Italian American Gardening Traditions” that will appear in Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association (Fall 2021). She has served on the EC for one term (2017-2019). She is also one of seven faculty advocates for a multidisciplinary outreach, research, and teaching initiative called Fostering Communities in the Kitchen and Garden, which aims to provide foster youths who transition to independent living with cooking skills, nutrition education, horticultural training, and digital narrative journalism techniques. She is a faculty affiliate of African American and Africana Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Sustainability Studies in her home institution. 

Lina Insana is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches post-Unification Italian culture; Holocaust literature and film; Italian Fascism and resistance; Italian American screen studies; and translation studies. Insana’s current work—in teaching, research, mentored research, and experiential learning—aims to put Italian and Italian Diaspora studies in direct dialogue. Her long-term project on expressions of italianità in North American Italian “colonies” in the interwar period is a case in point; the 2017 Italian American Review article on interwar ethnic advertising in Pittsburgh ('Italians of Pittsburgh: Don’t Be Selfish!’”) is a part of this larger project, as is a collective research project on Pittsburgh’s Columbus monument. Insana is the co-convener of the Italian Diaspora Archive Resource Map working group, hosted by Pitt’s World History Center, and co-host of the next in-person IASA conference. Her work in Italian American Studies also extends to children’s literature (“Strega Nona’s Ethnic Alchemy”) and teaching, as well as to several undergraduate projects that engage students in transnationally-oriented archival research and translation. She is the author of Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (MLA Scaglione Manuscript Prize, 2007; AAIS 20th c. Prize, 2009), as well as various studies on Italian Shoah post-memory. Her current book in progress is a geocritical cultural history of Sicily (Charting the Island: Sicilian Position and Belonging from Unification to the European Union), which traces the different forms of belonging Sicily’s cultural production has shaped for it over time, including diasporic forms.

My name is Giannina Lucantoni. Currently I am a full-time high school English teacher in my hometown, Niagara Falls, New York. In addition to a B.A. in English I hold advanced degrees in Secondary Education, Education Administration and English Literature. In 2018 I completed a graduate thesis titled Beyond Christ in Concrete: Exploring Assimilation, Identity and Manual Labor in Pietro di Donato’s This Woman and Three Circles of Light. Currently I am a doctoral candidate in the American Studies department at SUNY Buffalo. My doctoral dissertation, like my thesis, focuses on the works of Pietro di Donato. 

I joined IASA in Spring of 2019 shortly before presenting at the IASA International Symposium held at Roma Tre University in June 2019. While the global pandemic prevented me from attending the Italian Diaspora Summer Seminar through the Calandra Italian American Institute, I do plan to attend in June 2022.  Most recently, I hosted a IASA webinar in September 2021. The talk, titled, “For Father and Many Other Things,” discussed the poetry of Dr. Matthew Diomede with commentary and reading from the poet. I will virtually present at the upcoming IASA conference in November. 

John R. Mitrano (B.A., Northwestern University; M.A. and Ph.D., Boston College) has been a Lifetime Member of IASA for approximately 20 years. He is currently Professor of Sociology at Central Connecticut State University, where he has taught courses on the Italian-American experience and led study abroad programs to Italy. His current research centers on ethnic identity formation among college-aged Italian-American students and the role that cultural heritage programs play in that process. Over the past 25 years, he has published several articles in AIHA/IASA's "Proceedings" in the areas of ethnic identity formation and ethno-marketing, served as a reviewer for the Italian American Review, and previously was a member of the Executive Council and the Elections subcommittee in the early 2000s. If elected to the Executive Council today, he would like to serve the organization in the development of novel recruitment strategies to attract new members; further develop, catalog, and publicize academic I-A resources; and partner with other I-A organizations in ways that will contribute to the long-term vitality of IASA--while maintaining our unique identity. We may be a relatively small professional organization, but our body of work in academia has been enormous. He would welcome the opportunity to develop, nurture, and further publicize past, present, and future contributions from our members. Thank you for your consideration of my candidacy.

Phillip Sipiora is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Florida and has been a member of the Italian Club of Tampa for many years, having served on the Board of Directors for nearly a decade. His service at the Italian Club includes participating in numerous  fundraising and cultural events as well as serving as a judge for the annual Nelson Italiano Scholarship Award ($5,000), which is for high achieving local high school students. He has presented Italian Cinema (films plus lectures) at the Italian Club. He has written multiple articles for L’Unione Italiana, which is the Italian Club’s cultural magazine focusing on Italian and Italian-American culture. Some of his articles are derived from his years of teaching Italian Cinema in Italy for Florida State University and The University of South Florida and he has taught Italian Cinema and Italian-American Cinema for the past 30 years at USF. He gave a presentation on Martin Scorsese (“Mean Streets and Cultural Codes”) at an IASA Webinar Conference on August 7, 2020. In August of 1921, his edited book was published: Ida Lupino, Filmmaker (Bloomsbury Academic). He is currently working on an edited book on the neglected works of Martin Scorsese. If elected to the EC, he would contribute according to his experience in Italian-American culture, academic research, and teaching interests.

Michela Valmori is a scholar of Italian American studies, serving as an Italian-as-an-L2 instructor at the University of Bologna. In 2017/2018, Michela was a Fulbright Visiting Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught a cross-listed course on the Culture of Italian American emigration, and where she completed the writing of her family memoir, Rosa, the untold story of an Italian American immigrant and her hidden secrets. Apart from many publications both in the field of Italian American studies and Italian L2 teaching methodologies, Michela is a co-founder of “Strade Dorate, Osservatorio di Letteratura e Cultura Italoamericana” (https://www.stradedorate.org/), an educational project born in September 2020, aiming for the diffusion, in Italy, of the culture and literary production of the Italian American immigration. Nowadays, her area of interest and expertise has come to include the literary investigation of the patterns of gender violence within the immigrant Italian American communities at the beginning of 1900.

Serving also a teacher of languages and literatures in a local high school, as a potential IASA EC
member, Michela would be glad to develop interdisciplinary projects to diffuse the still-neglected patterns of the Italian American diasporic experience, addressing the juvenile public of teenagers and young adults. She firmly believes that educating the youngest generations is key to a brighter future. Michela is a lively professional, synergically dedicated to the methodologies of language teaching and the thorough research of all the factors that render the Italian American universe so unique and fascinating.