We at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute are delighted to send you the brochure of the second edition of the Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar, which also goes by its original name Italian Diaspora Studies Summer School. The basic mission of the IDSSS is to provide both graduate students and college/university faculty with an overall foundation of Italian immigration to the US and Canada and all that pertains, so that they will return to their home institutions and eventually set up a course on the Italian experience in North America.

The results of such a seminar / workshop are long-term. It is an educational process not only for those who attend but equally so for the future students who will take the courses our seminar participants will ultimately teach. This is the long-term educational process in which we need to engage. In some places already, courses on the Italian-American experience satisfy common core requirements such as diversity. Such courses, in turn, also attract a plethora of students who are not of Italian origin. This, to be sure, should be one of our goals: to engage in an outreach well beyond the confines of our own community.

Our second major educational goal should be the development of graduate courses and concentrations in Italian-American studies. Such programming will actually increase the greater awareness of who we are, where we came from, and we might be going. Indeed, there are still many things about our history that remains unknown to our own paesani, which, of course, raises an innumerable array of questions. We basically need to “invade” and/or “infiltrate” the university curriculum both here in the United States as well as in Italy. It has been far too long a glaring absence, especially in a state like New York, where none of the state Institutions have a graduate curriculum at the doctorate level.

Cav. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Ph.D.

Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

Distinguished Professor of European Languages

     and Literatures

Queens College/CUNY
25 West 43rd Street, 17th Fl
New York, NY 10036

www.qc.edu/calandra
www.cuny.tv/series/italics