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The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies
Thursday, September 10, 2009, 6 p.m. When Rosario Candela (1890-1953) left Palermo to come to America with his father, he was an 18-year-old laborer with virtually no knowledge of English. Yet he overcame his humble background, talked his way into the School of Architecture at Columbia University, and became an architect who designed many of the finest apartment houses in New York City. Architectural historian Andrew Alpern will discuss Candela’s unusually fast rise within his profession and the exceptional buildings he produced.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 6 p.m. Since at least the 1950s, some Italian Americans have organized anti-defamation campaigns to respond to unflattering, often mafia-inflected, representations of their ethnic identity. Even as these protestors have sought to shape the perception of Italian ethnicity, their strategies and outcomes have been deeply shaped by popular understandings of media. Using the debates surrounding the television show The Untouchables and the film The Godfather as examples, cultural historian Laura Cook Kenna will outline how ideas about media— artistry, influence, and audiences—have intersected with and underpinned the anti-defamation arguments and the ways ethnic images are interpreted and contested.
Monday, November 16, 2009, 6 p.m. In 1995, New York writer Lorenzo Carcaterra stunned audiences with a memoir entitled Sleepers, whichtold the story of the author and three friends, all from Hell’s Kitchen, who had been sentenced to a juvenile prison as boys. There, the memoir claims, they had been abused by a ruthless gang of guards. Even more sensationally, Sleepers described an elaborate conspiracy (including a local priest) to subvert the criminal trial that ensued years later when two of those boys murdered one of the guards. Christopher Wilson’s presentation will discuss the uses of ethnic, literary, and political memory in this memoir—patterns suggested especially by Carcaterra’s recent editorship of Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo—in order to decipher its claims about contemporary justice, victim’s rights, and neighborhood authority.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 6 p.m. Cesare Lombroso is widely-known as the “father of criminology,” but the Italian context of his life and thought is generally misunderstood or entirely ignored. Often identified only with his famous notion of the “born criminal,” Lombroso in fact produced a more complex theory that also incorporated psychological and social factors. As a supporter of Italian unification, a pioneer in psychiatry, a Jewish citizen in the new liberal state, and a socialist at the end of his life, Lombroso was a major figure in Italian national life and the international field of criminology. Mary Gibson will analyze Lombroso’s theories of “criminal man” and “criminal woman” in relation to the political, social, and cultural currents of his day.
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