In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, editor of Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association, sat down (virtually) with Guest Editors Dr. Elisa Bordin and Dr. Theodora Patrona to discuss a new special issue of Diasporic Italy on fathers, fathering, and fatherhood in the Italian American narrative. You can listen to the podcast here or read below for a transcript of the conversation.

University of Illinois Press: Welcome to the University of Illinois Press podcast, The UPside. I’m Mary Warner, the Journals Marketing Assistant for the Press, and today I’m excited to present our podcast, highlighting a special issue of Diasporic Italy, Volume 5, entitled “Fathers and Sons.” I’m joined today by guest editors Elisa Bordin and Theodora Patrona, and journal editor Ryan Calabretta-Sajder. We’re so excited to have you all here. Before we jump into the discussion about the issue, I’d love it if you could all introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your backgrounds.

Ryan Calabretta-Sajder: Good morning, good afternoon. My name is Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, and I am the Professor Antonio Marinoni and Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Endowed Chair of Italian and Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas, where I also direct the program of International and Global Studies. And I am the founding and current editor of Diasporic Italy, and I’m really happy to be here with University of Illinois Press and the co-editors, Elisa and Theodora, to discuss a little bit the really great gem that we just produced—and I want to talk about the cover at some point also, so Elisa, think about that—Volume 5, 2025, and as our colleague Mary already mentioned, the theme is “Fathers and Sons,” which is an underexplored topic in Italian American Studies and I’m really excited that they came to Diasporic Italy to discuss their work, and then, spend some time with us getting it published. So, I’m really happy that you’re tuning in today. Thank you.

Elisa Bordin: Hello, everyone. I’m Elisa Bordin, and I teach American Literature and Culture at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy. Ca’ Foscari is one of the leading Italian universities in the field of American Studies, with a long-established tradition in this discipline. There, I am an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Linguistics and Culture Studies, and I teach at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. My research focuses mainly on the American West, and I work specifically on the Western genre, Californian literature, and race and ethnic studies. And thank you, everyone, for having me here today.

Theodora Patrona: Hello, everyone. I’m Theodora Patrona. I teach literary classes at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece. The Aristotle University is the largest Greek university, and it is located in Thessaloniki, a multicultural city at the crossroads of history and cultures. I specialize in diaspora literature from a comparative angle. In particular, I have been researching and publishing on Italian and Greek literature of the Anglophone diaspora through the filter of gender studies. I’m also interested in autobiographical works, archival research, and trauma literature. And thank you for the honor of inviting me on this podcast, and getting us published, Ryan.

UIP: Great, thank you all so much again, and welcome to The UPside. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the journal, Diasporic Italy: The Journal of the Italian American Studies Association, is a scholarly, blind, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the Italian-American diaspora, focusing on timely and varied approaches to criticism and analysis of the field by presenting new perspectives and research on transnational issues. You can learn more about Diasporic Italy, including how to subscribe, submit your own work, or read online at go.illinois.edu/DI. Now that we know a little bit more about the journal, I’ll pass the mic over to Ryan so that he can ask some questions about the new issue.

RCS: Awesome, thanks so much, Mary. Theodora and Elisa, could you provide some background on where the idea for the special focus came from, how the issue came together, and where did you find the articles and the participants for the special volume?

EB: The idea for this issue actually came from Theodora. We didn’t know each other at all. I simply received an email from her asking if I’d be interested in this project and, as it happens, we have a friend in common, Stefano Luconi—and I’m glad to mention him, because he is an Italian historian who has done a lot of work on Italian-American history—and it happens that Stefano Luconi was actually my M.A. thesis supervisor, and when Theodora was discussing this project with him, he immediately thought of me. So, he remembered my early passion for issues of Italian American manhood and fatherhood, and so we could say that he’s responsible, at least initially, for the match. So, while the background idea is Theodora’s, I have to admit that I immediately accepted the proposal, even without knowing her, because issues of Italian Americanness and masculinity have always been central to my research. So, as I was mentioning earlier, when I introduced myself, I’ve been working on the Western genre for a while, but always through a gendered analytical lens. For example, I’ve explored the Western in relation to manhood and womanhood, so I’m deeply interested in gender dynamics. And on top of that, I’ve been working for quite a long time on the Italian American writer John Fante, and more broadly on Italian American literature and culture. So, for all these reasons, I was quick to answer yes to Theodora’s idea.

TP: Well, to be honest, this idea came from the actual lack of published works on the Italian American father and fatherhood. See, I had been working on a paper presentation. It was actually for the AISNA conference in L’Aquila in 2021, so I couldn’t find bibliography on the Italian American father, even though the father is such a central figure in literary works. So much on the mother, indeed, but not the father. So, I thought we should do this. We need to cover this important area. We started by circulating a call for papers. We gathered some possible contributions, and then the entire project was produced like this.

RCS: That’s great. It was really great working with you and seeing the various steps towards the end. You guys already had the really great list of participants and the articles in hand, so it was really fun to see your vision, and then bring it to life.

So, I’m sure you’ve experienced some highs and lows while working on this project. As we know as scholars, right, time is never on our side, between the teaching and the family life and the conferencing, and Theodora mentioned, I believe, archival research, right, and having to get places, and as she mentioned, she presented hers in 2021, which was still kind of in that post-COVID-y kind of moment, right? We were getting back to, or trying to get back to, you know, where we were before. So, what were some of the highlights from the process of editing the issue, and what were some challenges that you both encountered?

EB: When you do collect a special issue, the best thing about editing something together with a colleague and working with another colleague is learning new things from others. As scholars, as you were saying, Ryan, it’s difficult to cover, you know, the totality of authors, TV series, movies, cultural products that have been created over the years. And working as a team, it’s incredibly rewarding in this sense, because it allows you to go much deeper in your knowledge of different fields, and to combine your knowledge in different fields. Just an example, I’m a mother of three small children, and I don’t have much time to watch TV series, for example, and so I remember when we started 3 years ago that I discovered the TV series The Bear, thanks to Cristina Di Maio’s proposal on that cultural product. Three years ago, I hadn’t watched The Bear yet, and I didn’t expect from, you know, the commercials that it was connected to Italian American fatherhood. So, I learned, thanks to Cristina through her work—and I hope this is the same for Diasporic Italy’s readers: to be able to learn new things, to understand well-known authors and movies, maybe through a new lens. The challenges are many, and there’s a funny thing about this special issue that is on fatherhood, because I was pregnant and gave birth to my third child while working on this project, and that was certainly challenging. I mean, for that reason, I must sincerely, and I want to do it here: I want to thank Theodora for being such an incredible, supportive, and understanding academic partner.

TP: I need to thank you, Elisa, because one of the best things was learning from you. This project, through Elisa’s presence and hard work, was a lesson in female resilience and solidarity, actually, for me. Absolutely, learning from the writers was indeed crucial. Ah, it was very, very important, since the diverse works allowed us to dig deeper into areas we would not have the chance to do so otherwise. Not with the rhythms of life, not with all the workload that you mentioned, Ryan. So, it was a gift for us, in other words.

Now, about the difficult points, coordinating people is tough. Coordinating people that you do not really know, because we had a lot of participants we hadn’t met before, or hadn’t worked with before, is even more difficult, because they juggle diverse difficulties in their lives and careers, and this can be tricky, as you all know. And combining all this into a project and bringing it to fruition, it can be hard. You have to, be there via email or via Zoom with these people, and work on something, and get the whole project going, but at the same time, there is an entire universe that goes around, simultaneously, all these things happening in their realities, but the project has to move on. And this has to be done by the two co-editors.

RCS: Thank you both for that. I just wanted to follow up on two of the items. I believe Diasporic Italy has done, probably, like, the second or third published article on The Bear that I have seen. I’m someone who loves The Bear, and followed it from the beginning, and will also hopefully publish on The Bear, so I proudly say that from the bibliography that I’ve done, I think we’re, like, the second or third article on The Bear, and one of the earliest ones comes from another one of our colleagues in Italy, believe it or not. So, I think that’s actually really cool.

Second, though, as the editor, I have to say that some of the most challenging, but also rewarding moments is the peer review process, and although, as Theodora says, when you’re collaborating with a whole bunch of people—and one thing that I also want to add, besides their academic and familial situations, you know, diasporic journals deal with people of different backgrounds. So, you’re also balancing a cultural aspect through your communications, whether that’s, you know, in person, via Zoom, or via email, so it’s always, I think, an extra challenge when we do those collaborations with people we don’t know, as Theodora said, and a lot of the folks, they were most of the time people that I may have known or read, but never worked with, so that’s always, ah, really interesting. But I think the peer review process was very rewarding on this project. We did make sure that they went out to really important scholars of the field, and they also told us what they thought, right? And so, the editing process, I think, was probably a bit longer than maybe we expected early on, but I think that the finished product is a really, really strong product.

So, moving on, why do you think Italian American fatherhood is such a common trope and theme in films, TV, literature, and why do you think it’s worth studying?

EB: Italian American fatherhood is, in my opinion, a diffused theme, but I wouldn’t say that it is commonly studied, as Theodora was mentioning. There are some scholars, I’m thinking of Fred Gardaphé, who have explored Italian American masculinity and manhood, but in my opinion, not the specific feature of fatherhood, which is, of course, a core aspect of being a man. Well, fatherhood often gets overlooked in dedicated research. And as we argue in the introduction, studying fatherhood means engaging with multiple interconnected dynamics, because it involves understanding different styles of living manhood and the profound connections between past and future. I mean, where the fathers come from, what kind of future generations they wish to raise, and especially when you deal with, immigrants, migrants, and their fatherhood, well, they link geographically elsewhere, the old world, where the fathers may originate from, with maybe the present geography of the U.S, so that becomes complicated. And what’s interesting about dealing with fatherhood is how the representation of fatherhood, the narration of fatherhood, always straddles the personal and the social, the intimate and the public. In this sense, as a theme, it is a truly multifaceted subject, and we’ve been very excited to at least begin exploring this issue. 

RCS: And I very much agree, I think even when we think about gender studies and queer studies in the Italian American realm of literature and media studies, right, there are areas that are lacking, fatherhood being one, but also the way we look at gender and queerness, —your perfect example, Elisa, was masculinity. Right? There’s a lot about masculinity, hypermasculinity, that kind of aspect, but it’s not necessarily connected to fatherhood. That’s one area where the volume is actually very, very unique, really this specific theme throughout. I think that’s why it’s really rich. Not to say that, I mean, I think we have some really good stuff on masculinity, but I think it kind of ends there until this volume. Even manuscript-wise, there’s not a lot of things that come to my mind that bridge that masculinity to other.

EB: Yeah, as you were saying, Ryan, being a man doesn’t mean being a father. (RCS: Yep.) Even if you work within the field of gender studies, that doesn’t mean that you have covered fatherhood, so we thought, as Theodora felt from the very beginning, that that was a topic to be covered.

RCS: I love it. I loved it when it came on my desk, so…

In the introduction to this special issue, you write that fatherhood is not a prevalent theme in white non-ethnic canonical literature. Do you find this preoccupation with fatherhood in Italian cinema writing, or is it uniquely an Italian American theme? So, I think that we’re going to build off that conversation back and forth a little bit more.

EB: That’s a difficult question. I don’t know if I’m the best person suited to answer, because I am Italian, I live in Italy, so I’m so immersed in the culture that I may, you know, lack the necessary distance for a truly rational and objective response.

Yeah, my immediate and perhaps personal, too personal, answer would be, yes, fatherhood is definitely a theme in Italian cinema and literature, but it’s often addressed, less as an exploration of the types of fathers, Italian American, Italian men are and more as a reflection of a social legacy, you know, a sense of identity that the family unit confers. So, in my opinion, my feeling is that fatherhood is understood as within the family, that is, a personal and a social structure that is very, very important in Italy.

TP: I’m not an expert in Italian cinema, and I’m not Italian either, but my understanding through being a Greek (laughs), because Greece is a neighboring country with a culture and tradition that has a lot of similarities with Italian. One is that this is a field where the stereotypical gender roles, motherly and fatherly, are still blocking our view somehow. So, we actually still focus more on the mother, or perhaps on the traditionalist facets of being a father. But hopefully this is a changing situation. This is developing, so we are, we can see through Mediterranean writing, or through Mediterranean cinematography, I’m going to broaden the scope in this sense, we see more different types of fathers, and we hopefully we will see more of them in the future.

RCS: I very much agree. As someone who does Italian and Italian American [Studies], right, I love to show those queer families, right? And then how do we deal with the queer family? But we’re still kind of blocked in a lot of senses, especially in Italian and Italian American literature with the more traditional families. So, I think soon, Theodora, we’re going to get to a lot more of the changing family. So, thank you both.

Considering fatherhood is the focus of the issue, and I very much left it up to my co-editors for their title and their introduction, why the title “Fathers and Sons”? How is the relationship between Italian-American fathers and sons portrayed differently from that of Italian American fathers and daughters, for example? Or I would even argue, we have then, as someone who is the son of an Italian American mother, right, that very special bond, which I think is also extremely different than the masculine version, when, you know, the parent is masculine.

EB: Well, you know, Ryan, what we wanted to underline is that fatherhood is inherently relational, and so fatherhood is always defined by the presence of another human being, a daughter, a son, a biological child, a vicarious child, so we tried to explore all these differences. But initially, we were thinking in this relational and dynamic way, and that is necessary, because a father is not just a man, but a man becomes a father through his relationship with another human being. So that was important, having not just fathers, but fathers and something else. And so, I mean, we started from those fundamental questions. So, not only who is a father, but how does one become a father? What does fathering truly mean? And we’ve sought to distinguish between an abstract concept of fatherhood and the lived experience of actual fathers, examining how their roles evolve across generations. And this conceptual framework was reflected in our original title, “Father, Fathering, and Fatherhood in the Italian American Narrative,” that now serves as the title of our introduction. So, the man, the process, and then the idea of what it means to be a father, those are three different levels of interpretation. At the same time, we soon realized that the majority of these questions, I mean, were not answered by the fathers themselves, but they were predominantly articulated through the voices of their children. Many times, it’s not the father thinking about himself as a father, but it’s their children providing a narration, a representation. So, this crucial insight prompted us to adjust the main title of the issue and give explicit visibility to the children’s perspective. Also, maybe due to the fact that the majority of the essays talk about this relationship, and Theodora is the only one introducing the father-daughter relationship through the work of Gattuso Hendin, and that is, of course, a fundamental addition to the father and son topic.

TP: And this is precisely why perhaps we should have another volume titled “Fathers and Daughters,” right? (laughs) To initiate another project. I fully agree with what Elisa said, and I think that it is the father and offspring relationship was central to our discussion, but also the contributions that we received did not discuss the father-daughter bond. They focused on the father and son bond for some reason. So, yeah, perhaps reconsider another project in the future, like a series?

RCS: There we go. And the next question goes into chatting a little bit about the various articles that appear in the volume. There are also some interesting uses of the father figure. Because sometimes it’s not necessarily the father, or sometimes it’s the thought of the father, or a fatherly figure that takes the place of the actual father. So, as we move on, can you chat a little bit about the various articles that appeared in our special volume, Volume 5? And then also make sure each of you chat about your own piece also.

EB: Yeah, the issue features six articles and two translations. The first one is William Boelhower’s essay that relates and analyzes Gino’s story. This is a case of matricide in the Lower East Side in New York at the beginning of last century, beginning of the 20th century. Gino is an Italian American boy who killed his mother to honor his dead father, and Boelhower analyzes this case through some psychiatrist accounts of the time. And he investigates not the boy’s relation with the mother, of course, but with his father, because the father apparently talked to the child in his dreams. And so, what Boelhower does is unveiling a diasporic idea of paternal honor that crosses the ocean and moves from Calabria in Southern Italy to New York.

So, the articles are organized in a sort of chronological way, and we start from the story of fatherhood from the beginning of the 20th century, and then the second essay is by Carla Francellini, who examines the evolution of the father figure in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and Three Circles of Light. And she illustrates how di Donato’s work transcends traditional immigrant autobiography. Francellini analyzes paternal characters, very well-known ones, like the iconic Geremio and other absent father figures, and she reveals how di Donato uses themes of sexuality and rebellion to navigate Italian American identity and assimilation. What her essay does is argue that these novels constitute a pioneering transnational fiction that challenges the 1930s proletarian label, and she highlights the father figure as a crucial symbol for social justice and the negotiation of an idea of the United States of America.

I follow with my essay, “A Burden and a Reward, The Father Figure in John Fante’s Narrative,” that’s the title of my article that analyzes the evolution of the father figure in John Fante’s literature works from his early to mature years. In this essay, I argue that the father figure is crucial narrative material in Fante’s work, typical ethnic stuff that was extremely important in the 1930s. I build on other scholars’ works where they pointed out that Fante’s early works set, for example, in Colorado, fathers are sources of ethnic shame, are figures to be rejected, but I also argue that in Fante’s later works, those set in Los Angeles, the absence of the father figure indicates the author’s attempt to write outside the ethnic canon, so his attempts to go American. And I read in this vein novels such as Wait Until Spring, Bandini; Ask the Dust; The Brotherhood of the Grape, and I illustrate how Fante uses father-son dynamics to explore his own place in American letters. So, it’s a move between father as content as in to father as a literary device to negotiate the author’s position in American letters.

And I’ll also introduce, Theodora, if you don’t mind, what you do in this special issue. As I was saying, Theodora examines the problematic father and offspring relationship at the center of two important works: Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s novel, The Right Thing to Do, published in 1988, in Carl Capotorto’s memoir, Twisted Head, published in 2009. And in her analysis that brings together the ethnic Bildungsroman and the emerging and popular autobiographical writing, the collision between children and fathers is envisaged as a clash of two worlds. So, Theodora does some very good close readings of the two texts, and she ponders over this autocratic father figure, its violent physical and verbal practices and their roots, the children’s revolt against both ethnic and ethnic culture, and father figures, ah, their attempt to flee away, and the final reconciliation that comes with the loss, usually, of older generations. So, even though there’s some violence, physical violence and verbal violence, Theodora concludes on an optimistic note, I would say, and she stresses the surfacing of a more empathetic Italian American form of fatherhood.

TP: The last two contributions have to do with film and TV. Michael-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis’s essay is a rich and diachronic discussion of four Rocky films. In his contribution, Markodimitrakis focuses on the changing stereotypical projections of Italian American males in the last two decades of the 20th century up until the first two decades of the 21st century. While he meticulously examines Rocky’s malleable fatherly profile and the concurrent sociocultural context of its film, Markodimitrakis regards the Italian American process of whitening as a deciding factor of masculine performance. Liberated from rigid gender roles and expectations in the last installments of the series and its spin-off, Rocky’s fatherly figure revamps traditionalist views on fathering and introduces family bonding beyond bloodlines and race.

Finally, Cristina Di Maio’s essay focuses on the TV show The Bear that was mentioned before explored an example of new Italian American fathering. In it, the young chef, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, creates a surrogate family out of the kitchen staff of the restaurant he inherits from his brother, and in so doing, he foregrounds a multiplicity of fatherly roles, showing diverse images of fatherhood and the changing notion of Italian American masculinity, reshaped by the dynamics of global capitalist economy. This development aligns with a concatenation of complicated Italian American paternal figures in television, like Tony Soprano, but not only. Di Maio contends that the fatherly figures in The Bear refunctionalize and at times dismantle previous archetypes of Italian American masculinity and parenting practices. Simultaneously, they outline new trajectories for fathering in response to both the crisis of the male breadwinner model and pervasive economic precariousness.

The issue also includes two translations of the works that I worked on in my essay, and which works, the novel and the memoir, have not been published in Italian, have not been translated in Italian. The first one is a wonderful translation of a telling excerpt from Josephine Gattuso Heandin’s The Right Thing to Do by Enrico Mariani. The other one is an excerpt from Carl Capotorto’s The Twisted Head, translated by Margherita Lanza. With Elisa, we would like to warmly thank the contributors, and especially the translators, for all their hard work and meticulousness.

RCS: Absolutely, they did a great job. It’s a really great volume. Let’s talk a moment about the afterword that’s penned by Fred Gardaphé from the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute and CUNY Queens College, where he’s a Distinguished Professor. Can you discuss why you chose to end this issue this way, and why you felt it was important to include a personal reflection along with the scholarly articles?

EB: Ah, Fred Gardaphé is the scholar that has worked more than anyone else on Italian American manhood, and he has published a lot in this theme. And for that reason, he is a critical reference for many of the essays gathered here, and we wanted to pay homage to his work, but also, in this specific case, to give space to the man rather than the scholar. And that’s what you have in the afterward, an intimate story from Fred Gardaphé’s familiar background that is very touching, in my opinion.

TP: Adding to that, I would say that Fred Gardaphé has fathered, in many ways, many writers and scholars in the field. For me personally, Professor G, along with Stefano Luconi that Elisa mentioned in the beginning, is the quintessential fatherly figure of Italian American Studies, because, I cannot but see him as a mentor from my first years as a graduate student. He has always been a scholarly father, firm, and always, always supportive and encouraging.

RCS: Theodora, I actually love that. I think that’s really great, and I think that really does sum up the whole essence of Fred, as also someone who met him as an undergraduate. Because I’m from Chicago, he would still come back and forth and give talks at the Casa Italia and all that kind of stuff, so that’s very great, that’s very Fred.

Is the representation, do you think, of Italian American men and fathers changing in the media? And if so, how?

EB: Absolutely, and that is the reason why we tried to organize the essay in the sort of chronological way, in order to guide the reader through time in our analysis of Italian American fatherhood. Of course, it has nothing to do with ideas of progress, of evolution, it is just a way to see how things change over the years. I mean, even Italian American Studies have been changing, and fatherhood changes. Everything that is culturally based changes with time and space, and so, we hope that the changes of the future are for the better.

TP: Definitely, definitely, and that’s why we end with the images of The Bear, of the new father, the surrogate family, the tenderness, the cracks in the armor of the hard shell of this traditionalist, masculine man who’s so intense, who was so authoritative. We’re moving away from that, and we are really optimistic about this.

RCS: I like that, and also when we see the representations in the media, right, we see a diverse community. It’s not necessarily the family, in some regards it is, in The Bear, it very much is, right? The kitchen is very diasporic. There’s a Somali migrant in the back of the kitchen, too, right? And we know the relationship with Somalia and Italy, so it’s very rich, and I do think you see that evolution quite nicely throughout the work, throughout the volume.

Pivoting away from the special issue, do either of you have other projects you’re working on now that you’d like our listeners to be aware of? I want to just shout out Elisa for a moment, because Elisa… I was just actually at her home in Venice in December, before the year closed, for a really amazing commemorative celebration of John Fante after, and I don’t remember how many years it was, 25 years after the original conference? (EB: Thirty, thirty.) Thirty years. And so, she can talk a little bit more about that. That was one of the projects that was kind of paralleling throughout the publication of the volume. So, so I’ll definitely leave the word to Elisa on that.

EB: Yeah, thank you, Ryan. Yes, as Ryan was saying, I’m still working on Fante. We had this international conference dedicated to Fante last December in Venice, thirty years after the first conference held in Los Angeles in 1995. That was, 1995 was the beginning of Fante Studies, and so we wanted to do something similar. And, specifically, I’m working on archival material by Fante, like treatments, short stories, and novels that he couldn’t publish back in his days, because, and that’s my point, he was an ethnic writer, so that stopped his circulation, but also the themes that he could explore as a writer. For example, right now, I’m working on an unpublished treatment titled Home is the Hunter that Fante wrote with Carey McWilliams, who was an important journalist, editor, lawyer, and activist, left-wing activist back in the 1930s. And the treatment is about the repatriation of Mexican Americans during the 1930s. I’m working on that in order to better understand Fante’s depiction of other ethnicities and his unexpected political interests for other marginalized communities back in the first half of the 20th century. So that is one of the projects I’m working on. The other one is a broader project on Californian literature and an edited volume about California as a space of exception and disaster with two other Italian colleagues.

TP: Thank you for asking, Ryan. Inspired by Helen Barolini’s fundamental work on Italian American women’s writings, I’ve been working on a project, a quite ambitious one, on pioneer women writers of the Greek and Italian Anglophone diaspora. I’m still at the very beginning, but I’m really excited about this, and I’m hoping that it will all work out well.

RCS: Thank you, thank you both for sharing your upcoming projects. Before we conclude the discussion of the special issue, who are your favorite Italian American fathers in literature, film, or TV? And you can’t say the authors that you worked on, Elisa is going to say John Fante, so that’s out. (EB: [laughing] Oh yeah, yeah.) You can’t say John Fante. I mean, that we know. Besides John Fante and Josephine Gattuso-Hendin and Carlo Capotorto, which, by the way, I mean, there’s not a lot published on those two authors, Theodora. So, we really also appreciate that contribution in particular, because there are a lot of Italian American authors, right? And not all of them have been studied, so I think also the volume is particular, because there’s a balance of more canonical authors, like John Fante is very canonical in Italy, for example, and Josephine Gattuso-Hendin and Carlo Capotorto’s works. So, I think it’s a nice balance of more known works and lesser-known works, and both need to be studied through these new lenses, so… but Elisa, first to you.

EB: Okay, so, well, I was going to give a very obvious answer, and so now I have to change and give an unexpected one. Okay, of course, I mean, as we were saying, John Fante is one of my favorite Italian American writers, but then, thinking more broadly in terms of culture, I really like Charles Atlas, the Tocci brothers, so figures that are not writers, but cultural figures connected to the use of the body in unexpected ways. For those of you who don’t know them, Charles Atlas was one of those initial bodybuilders, at the beginning of the 20th century, so, I mean, his Southern Italian origins are usually concealed. The Tocci brothers are real people, they were conjoined twins from Northern Italy who moved to the United States, and they were one of the stars of some freak shows, and they became rich in the United States, and then they came back to Italy. And theirs was a disabled body. They were conjoined twins, as I was saying, and I think that I like pairing these three figures together—Charles Atlas and the Tocci Brothers—because it is something that I would like to explore in the future. So, I mean, it is an interest and the project at the same time, how they tell an American male body is narrated, is seen in unexpected ways, as a bodybuilder, as a source of difference, disability. So that is something that has still to be explored more instead of some canonical figure of the powerful Godfather figure in Italian American Studies.

TP: So, I am definitely opting for the first Italian American father I ever saw on TV growing up in Greece in the late ’80s, and that is Tony Micelli in Who’s the Boss? the ABC sitcom, a figure that I have also discussed in a paper I published in 2016, which was actually my first attempt at Italian American masculinities. I think that there is a lot of room for figures through popular culture, a lot of room for discussion, and I think that images of Italian American males on TV and film, since they are so impactful, they need to be addressed again and again, and because all this has quite an impact on the perception of Italian American masculinity by non-Italian Americans, especially. Okay, yes, definitely Tony Micelli, and some good laughs in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

RCS: I think that’s great. Many of you know Alan Gravano, who is a co-editor of mine on many projects, and he is the editor of Italian Americana. We’ve talked a lot about doing a serious co-edited volume on the representation of Italian Americans on television, period, which is really a lacking field, right? There’s a book by Jonathan Cavallero that just came out with Routledge a year or two ago, and it looks more at certain unique aspects of television and how television works, and then the representation of the Italian American within that world, but from a more cultural studies perspective, there’s definitely a lot lacking. And Tony Micelli is a great, unique, using Judith Butler’s term, “ungendered, gender-troubled” person, so I like that a lot. That’s great, Theodora. Okay. Thank you both.

As we start to wind down the podcast, the cover is amazing, I think the cover’s amazing, I think they did a great job. And Elisa, can you explain a little bit, why this cover, what it represents? And make sure you find a copy online of the cover!

EB: The cover comes from a drawing of an Italian artist. His name is Thomas Brazzolotto, and I asked him to draw something for us, and so we were exploring possibilities and ideas, and then we decided to have a father in a kitchen, taking care of a small child. And that’s the kind of visual frame that we wanted for this project. So, in spite of many narrations, many works that our authors explore, you know, the difficulties of being a father, the violence that sometimes children experience, because fathers, they have their own difficulties. We appreciated, we like this idea of having on the cover a father who’s holding a baby, who’s taking care, who’s exploring, who’s in a mother’s space, like the kitchen, you know. So, we wanted to give that idea of nuances of fatherhood, and not of what we expect sometimes, because there are a lot of good fathers in the world.

RCS: Thank you, I personally love the cover.

UIP: And thank you all for joining the podcast today, and thank you, Ryan, for hosting. Before we close out the podcast, Ryan, do you have any other projects you’d like to mention?

RCS: We’re working on closing Volume 6, which will be another rich volume. Volume 6 has some really up-and-coming scholars. We’re going to be publishing two graduate students who are writing their dissertations, so some really interesting work from them that came out of an IASA conference two years ago at Boca Raton, so we’re excited about that. We have a history piece. We have a piece that, we wanted to do a little corner on affect theory, but in the end, we only received one paper for that. And then we’re still trying to see about another little angle on speculative fiction and Italian Americana, which is really interesting, because again, it’s kind of a field that’s not so well-researched, though SUNY just published a really great volume by Mark DiPaolo and Anthony Lioi, that focuses just on that. And in fact, it’s a collaboration with them, it’s an extension of the work that they were doing in their volume, so that’s what we’re looking forward to.

We’re always looking for more submissions, across the fields. Remember that Diasporic Italy is interdisciplinary, so we always try to have pieces across the different genres and across the different subjects, including—we always get stuff in literature, but particularly also history, and we like to boast that we do a lot with pedagogy and education. So those of you who may not have the time to work on a new research project, but you’re teaching a new class, or you’re integrating Italian Americana in a really cool comm class, or a really cool history class, we want to see what you’re doing, we want to see didactic units, we want to see how the students are reacting to some of that work that are also not in traditional Italian-American classes. So, think about that. And the other aspect that we really like is translation. I’m really, happy that Elisa was able to work with Theodora and myself to get two works that have never, ever been translated into Italian. Now, we didn’t obviously translate the whole thing, but we had two sections that Theodora picked that had to do with her article, and Theodora and Elisa worked together to get those pieces translated, so I think that’s also one unique aspect of our journal, so we’re always looking for those kinds of things in future volumes.

UIP: Thank you so much and thank you for the preview of future content.

And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in to learn more about this special issue of Diasporic Italy. If you’re interested in submitting your own work, the journal publishes on all aspects of the arts, humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, and, as Ryan said, particularly interested in pedagogy, comparative studies, translation. Additionally, the journal encourages submissions on movement to, from, and within Italy, conceptualizing all aspects of the diaspora, including intercoloniality and post-colonialism. To find out more about the journal, please visit go.illinois.edu/DI and consider writing to your librarian to recommend that they subscribe to Diasporic Italy.

 For further reading, the University of Illinois Press is also the publisher of Italian Americana and Italica. Illinois Press also publishes books like Cinema of Crushing Motherhood: A New Feminist Cinema by Olivia Landry, which explores portrayals of motherhood in film, and Hidden Histories of Unauthored Migrations from Europe to the United States, edited by Danielle Battisti and S. Deborah Kin, a book relevant for anyone interested in European or diaspora studies.

 RCS: And let me add that Danielle Batisti was an associate editor of Diasporic Italy from its birth for the first couple of years, before she got too busy and had to take on a different editorial role but, yeah, so she’s one of us.

UIP: Definitely check out her book, yes. You can view all of these and more at press.uillinois.edu. Thank you.