President's Pages of the Past

August 2009

Dear Members of AIHA,

2009 has emerged as a great year for AIHA. Our upcoming conference in Baton Rouge promises to be a lively event filled with challenging and innovative presentations. Your willingness to submit your proposals on an expedited schedule has ensured a successful and well-attended event. I am very grateful to all of you for heeding the call. We now have every concurrent session filled with a wonderful variety of subjects, presenters, and approaches.

I understand that there was some confusion over the number of presentations members could give and apologize if anyone’s plans were affected. The rule of a maximum of 2 presentations per member was put into effect 4 years ago in order to enable our organization to grow into a larger community of scholars, writers, and performers and remain open for newcomers. We are so fortunate in the richness and variety of the presentations that will be given in Baton Rouge, as well as in your kindness in making prompt submissions, that I particularly and deeply regret any confusion that arose this year. I will ensure that, from now on, this practice will be formally added to our website and appear in the initial call for papers developed for each of our future conferences so that confirmation of the practice will not constitute an inconvenience for anyone.

Last year, as Vice President, I concluded our agreement with EBSCO publishers to gain electronic publication and listings on multiple databases of the conference essays after their publication in our traditional book format. Work from our 2007 Denver conference, Italian American Passages: Collected Essays, edited by John Paul Russo and Teri Ann Bengiveno, and the volume, Small Towns, Big Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans, edited by Dennis Barone and Stefano Luconi, will be eligible for these two forms of publication. Electronic publication will open up our work to a far larger, international audience than we were able to reach before.

The success of our conferences and the publications that flow from them have helped establish our multidisciplinary field and our presence as an affiliate organization of the American Historical Association and as an official Discussion Club at the Modern Language Association. We can look forward to AIHA’s presence at the AHA conference in January 2010 with an AIHA panel called “Race, Gender, and Italian American Working-Class Politics in America, 1880-1930” developed by Peter Vellon. We also look forward to beginning our second decade at the MLA through AIHA’s 2009 presentation of a panel on poetry, developed by Peter Covino.

I would like to offer a warm thanks to Mary Jo Bona who served as president for the past two years with such distinction and led us through two enormously successful conferences, to formally welcome our new Vice President, Teresa Fiore, and to gratefully acknowledge the continuing, exceptional service of our Treasurer, Dawn Esposito, our Secretary, George Guida, our Archivist, Victor Basile, and our Webmaster, JoAnne Ruvoli Gruba.

Please join me in Baton Rouge in thanking William Boelhower, Paolo Chirumbolo, and Joseph Ricapito for serving on the conference committee for “Southern Exposures: Locations and Relocations in Italian American Culture.” We owe a particular thanks to Joseph Ricapito, who chairs the committee and has worked with great devotion on the conference. We have an exceptional event to look forward to in Baton Rouge and I look forward to a great time for all of us.

Sincerely,
Josephine Gattuso Hendin
President, AIHA

September 2008

Dear AIHA Members,

The fall season is just around the corner as we prepare for our 41st annual conference—“Small Towns, Big Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans” at Southern Connecticut State University on November 6-8, 2008. If members haven’t already registered for the conference, we encourage you to do so now in order to benefit from the conference hotel rates. Based on the many incarnations of the program, the focus and topics look rich, indeed. We are honored to have as our Keynote Speaker, Professor William Boelhower of Louisiana State University who will speak on the place of Little Italy and its development into urban spaces in many regions throughout the country. I must also express heart-felt thanks to members of AIHA, especially Anthony Tamburri, Josephine Hendin, Dawn Esposito, Fred Gardaphe, John Paul Russo and Jennifer Di Gregorio Kightlinger, for helping to assemble the original program, and to our Web Manager, JoAnne Ruvoli, for working steadily with me to make changes throughout the past three months. We are all working closely with local chair, Professor Michael Vena of Southern Connecticut State University, to make our annual conference an inspiring and comfortable experience.

Sad news to share with those members who had not heard of the death of founder and first President of the American Italian Historical Association, Rudolph J. Vecoli, who died peacefully on June 17, 2008, of complications from acute leukemia. Rudi was 81 and a retired University of Minnesota historian, and longtime director of the Immigration History Research Center. My “immigration” experience with Rudi began in 1991 when a research grant brought me to the doors of the old IHRC, where I poured over the Italian documents for a luxurious week, eating lunch daily with Rudi and his wife in the small lunchroom. That early connection with Rudi helped me in all kinds of ways, but mostly, I was grateful for Rudi’s generosity toward me with materials I did not know about. A burgeoning literary critic, I was treated in 1991 with all the respect and deference of the established national and international historians who have visited the Center; I will never forget the kindness of the administrative staff there and Rudi’s welcoming gestures.

The College of Liberal Arts as part of the University’s Campaign Minnesota has endowed a professorship in honor of Rudolph J. Vecoli in Immigration Research History, underscoring Rudi’s leadership and the rise to prominence of IHRC in immigration scholarship.

On behalf of the American Italian Historical Association Officers, Executive Committee and Members, we honored Rudolph Vecoli through a donation to a memorial endowment named after his beloved parents, Settima Palmerini and Giovanni Vecoli on behalf of the University of Minnesota Foundation.

Rudi Vecoli’s own achievements as a first-rate historian, the founding director of the Immigration History Research Center, and the American Italian Historical Society illuminate the breadth of his talents and the commitment to scholarly study. In closing, I want to express my deepest condolences on behalf of our organization on Rudi’s passing and invite members to attend the Plenary Session organized in honor of Dr. Vecoli at 9:00 am on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at the AIHA conference in New Haven. Please join us.

In the meantime, I wish all AIHA members un buon autunno and a presto novembre,

Mary Jo

April 2008

C’ è aria di primavera: spring is in the air and the daffodils are in bloom here on Long Island! My spring welcome to all members of AIHA and a few reminders of importance in our association’s schedule. The 41st annual conference of the American Italian Historical Association will take place on November 6-8 in New Haven, CT., at Southern Connecticut State University under the auspices of our local chair, Professor Michael Vena. The title of the conference is “Small Town, Big Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans.”

We are looking forward to receiving a plethora of presentation topics, as the focus of this year’s conference encourages an interdisciplinary awareness of the relationships between Italian Americans and urban lives. We encourage members to invite new scholars into the fold with an awareness of the interdisciplinary nature of our organization. While the due date for paper presentations (May 1st) is closely encroaching, we also encourage the submission of complete panels, especially for those of you who have been long-time attendees at our conferences. Putting a panel together is not only a good way to exert coherency over a topic, but it is also a way to reach out to other members in new and refreshing ways that revitalize scholarly ideas.

I recall that in my early years in the organization, I was invited by other long-time members to present on their panel: doing this enabled me to experience for the first time in my academic history a serious and sustained cross-disciplinary conversation among colleagues. Not only was the invitation a generous gesture on the part of distinguished AIHA members, but it helped me believe that I could perform useful, interdisciplinary work, eventuating in further academic work in Italian American Studies. I have our association to thank for making possible the further development of the field of Italian American Studies and my participation in it as a scholar from the humanities. I hope this kind of connection continues and increases in our organization and we think to the future.

As a kind reminder to all who want to present papers at this year’s conference: presenters must be members of the Italian American Historical Association. For membership details and further information about the conference, due dates for proposals/panels, and hotel location, see the AIHA website at http://www.aihaweb.org/

As a reminder to all members: please now address all correspondence to our association to “AIHA, in c/o The John D. Calandra Institute, Queens College/CUNY, 25 W. 43rd, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10036.”

My best to all of you as you complete semesters and the busy work of springtime.

Cordialmente,

Mary Jo Bona

October 2007

Buon Autunno!

I hope this greeting finds AIHA members well. As you know, October is a busy month for Italian Americans, especially during Columbus Day celebrations around the country. Cultural events range from academic lectures to community parades, and our organization reflects this busy time too, as our annual conference usually occurs toward the end of October or the first week of November.

This year, the 40th Annual Conference of the American Italian Association will be held in Denver, Colorado, November 1-3, 2007. The conference is called “Italian Passages: Making and Thinking History” and the docket is filled with presentations ranging from regional impacts on Italian immigrants to creating Italian American archives in our nation’s libraries. If members haven’t already registered, we encourage them to do so—the conference looks exciting and should be a lively and edifying experience for all participants.

Alisa Zahller, Associate Curator of the Colorado History Museum will be showing her exhibit on “The Italians in Denver” concurrently and I encourage conference attendees to visit the exhibition in between sessions. Alisa generously functioned as local chair of the local arrangement committees and we are all thankful for her help. Janet Worrall, longtime AIHA member and now professor emerita, chaired the Academic Program Committee, putting many hours into creating the program and handling the myriad details that go into putting together a conference. Deepest thanks to Jan for all her dedication. Vince Taglialavore, an active member of the Dante Alighieri Society of Denver, worked on the local committee and generously offered a donation to help underwrite the event. We are thankful to these three local leaders and a host of other volunteers who are making this event come together. Finally, AIHA thanks Dominic Candeloro, former Executive Director, for establishing initial contact with Alisa Zahller, enabling us to bring our organization to the mile-high city.

As we make further strides in achieving for our organization a higher profile in the academic community, AIHA officers and EC Board members are actively involved in passing on a stronger institution to our intellectually vibrant young scholars in areas of the social sciences and the humanities. As a reminder to all members: please now address all correspondence to our association to “AIHA, in c/o The John D. Calandra Institute, Queens College/CUNY, 25 W. 43rd, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10036.”

We are all praying in other areas of the country that the snowflakes don’t fly in Denver until after our annual conference, but Mother Nature will have the last word, as always, on such matters. Safe travels to all attendees. In the meantime, I send greetings to all AIHA members, wishing them a splendid fall, a thankful November, and a blessed December.

Ci vediamo a Denver!

Mary Jo Bona
Presidentessa, AIHA

June 2007

Prego! Along with the creation of our new website (www.aihaweb.org) the Italian American Historical Association has also undergone substantive changes in the past year and a half. I would like briefly to welcome past and current members of our association and encourage those who have not yet joined us to do so. In an effort to provide basic information about our organization and update members on our current status and association goals, I have instituted this page, which I hope will help members, potential members, and visitors to our website to learn a bit about our organization.

The American Italian Historical Association is a non-for-profit interdisciplinary academic organization devoted to disseminating information about Italian America, from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. Popularly known as AIHA, our association has undergone necessary and life-sustaining changes in the past two years. Under the leadership of our past president, Anthony J. Tamburri, the officers and the Executive Committee board members have made important changes to the Constitution and the by-laws, which included decreasing the number of EC board members and requiring officers to take leadership in matters of governance. We have managed to secure a more permanent and principal office in the city of New York. The recent hiring of Anthony J. Tamburri as Dean of the John D. Italian American Calandra Institute has made it possible for AIHA to find its academic home at the institute. Thus, please now address all correspondence to our association to “AIHA, in c/o The John D. Calandra Institute, Queens College/CUNY, 25 W. 43rd, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10036.”

As such, we, the officers and the executive committee, have kindly asked former AIHA executive director, Dominic Candeloro, to stay on as a volunteer on behalf of our organization, to which he generously agreed. In an email posting to all AIHA members, Dominic explained that our new arrangement here at Calandra will offer our association “an opportunity to direct resources to publications and other academic pursuits.” We couldn’t agree more and thank Dominic for all his hard work and support over the past six years. We are hoping to achieve for our organization a higher profile in the academic community and pass on a stronger institution to our next generation of scholars and writers.

In the meantime, we have much work to do and realize that the work of an association does not achieve fruitful results from the hands of only a few. As EC board member Teresa Cerasuola reminded us, “many hands make light work,” so I’d like to conclude my welcoming comments by thanking a few of those helpful hands I haven’t yet thanked, whose work on behalf of the American Italian Historical Association strengthens our purpose.

Due to the generosity of long-time member, Janet Worrall, we have a local committee in Denver chairing our conference. Alisa Zahller of the Colorado Historical Society has worked diligently with Janet and the local committee to make possible our annual convention there in November of 2007. The 2007 conference registration form is now available on our AIHA website and, if you are not a current 2007 member of AIHA, a membership form for our association is also available on the website. I also want to thank JoAnne Ruvoli-Gruba for her deft technological skills as she has agreed to serve as our AIHA web manager. We are still in need of a volunteer (s) to become our Newsletter editor, so we ask your patience in this presently unmanned area.

With thanks to the AIHA officers and the EC board for administrating and supporting the changes in our organization; and, with special thanks to past president Anthony J. Tamburri, who continues to work indefatigably on behalf of our organization, and who responds with kindness, always answering my many questions!

Avanti!

Mary Jo Bona
President, American Italian Historical Association

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