Introduction and notes: Yiorgos Anagnostou
Yiorgos Anagnostou is Professor and the Director of the Modern Greek Program at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America.
Contributions: Eleftheria Arapoglou
Eleftheria Arapoglou has been teaching in the American Studies department at UC Davis since 2012. Before that she taught at Aristotle University and Anatolia College in Greece. She has received several fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright Program, the Friends of the Princeton University Library, and the Greek State Scholarship Foundation, among others. She has coedited six volumes and has contributed as an assistant editor to two special issues of the journal GRAMMA. Her monograph A Bridge over the Balkans: Demetra Vaka Brown and the Tradition of “Women’s Orients” was published by Gorgias Press in 2011, while her most recent publications are Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and Transculturation (Routledge, 2013) and Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Contributions: Angelyn Balodimas-Bartolomei
Angelyn Balodimas-Bartolomei is a professor in the School of Education at North Park University–Chicago and coordinator of the ESL/Bilingual Teachers Endorsement and MALLC programs. In both Greece and America, she earned degrees in Greek studies and social work; Greek pedagogy; linguistics/ESL; and comparative international education and policy studies. Having received numerous grants, Angie has performed extensive studies on Greek Americans and Italian Americans, southern Italian Griki, Greek Romaniote Jews, and the endangered Colognoro dialect of Tuscany. She has also examined Holocaust education in Greece, anti-Mafia education, Italian images in foreign language textbooks, and Italian American statue makers. Her latest work focuses on the Greek communities of Europe.
Contributions: Jim Cocola
Jim Cocola is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2016). A past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Forum on Italian American Language, Literature, and Culture, he has published related work in journals including Italian Americana, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and VIA: Voices in Italian Americana.
Contributions: Donna R. Gabaccia
Donna R. Gabaccia is professor of history emerita at the University of Toronto. She previously served as director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of many books and articles on class, gender, and ethnicity in American immigration history, on migration in global history, and on Italian emigration around the world. She is a past president of the Social Science History Association and writes often about interdisciplinarity in migration studies. She is a descendant of Italian migrants and the first person in her family to obtain a higher education.
Contributions: Fred Gardaphe
Fred Gardaphe is distinguished professor of English and Italian/American studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He is a Fulbright fellow (University of Salerno, 2011) and past president of the Italian American Studies Association (formerly AIHA), MELUS, and the Working Class Studies Association. His books include Italian Signs, American Streets (Duke University Press, 1996), From Wiseguys to Wise Men (Routledge, 2006), The Art of Reading Italian Americana (Bordighera, 2011), and Read ’Em and Reap (Bordighera, 2017). He is cofounder and coeditor of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, editor of the Italian American Culture Series of SUNY Press, and associate editor of the Fra Noi.
Introduction and notes: Yiorgos D. Kalogeras
Yiorgos D. Kalogeras is Professor Emeritus of American ethnic and minority literature. He taught until his retirement (2018) at the Department of English Aristotle at University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He is the author, co-author, or editor of twelve books.
Contributions: Kostis Kourelis
Kostis Kourelis is an architectural historian who specializes in the archaeology of the Mediterranean and how it shapes modern notions of identity, space, and aesthetics. His recent fieldwork focuses on the archaeology of labor, housing, and modern immigration. He directs archaeological surveys of deserted villages and refugee camps in Greece, as well as ethnic slums, temporary housing, and internment camps in the United States. He is associate professor of art history at Franklin & Marshall College.
Contributions: Panayotis League
Panayotis League is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Florida State University and director of the Center for Music of the Americas. His research has appeared in Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and The Harvard Review of Latin America. His monograph Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora was published in 2021.
Contributions: Stefano Luconi
Stefano Luconi teaches US history at the University of Padua in Italy. His research interests focus on immigration to the United States, with specific attention to Italian Americans’ voting behavior and transformation of ethnic identity. His publications include From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia (SUNY Press, 2001) and The Italian-American Vote in Providence, Rhode Island, 1916–1948 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). His most recent book is L’anima nera degli Stati Uniti: Quattrocento anni di presenza afro-americana (CLEUP, 2020).
Contributions: Michail C. Markodimitrakis
Michail C. Markodimitrakis is an associate liaison expert for the UNHCR in Greece. His ethnographic field research focuses on host countries, policies on migration, and the experiences of displaced populations in host communities, along with representations of ethnicity, nationality, and racism in digital media and archives. He has published book chapters and articles on popular culture, with an ongoing interest in intermedial representations of the Other, abject fear, horror, and embodiments of evil. He has taught modules on academic research and writing, ethnic studies, Anglophone literature, and Greek/English for speakers of other languages.
Introduction and notes: Theodora Patrona
Theodora Patrona is affiliated with the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece, as Special Teaching Fellow (EDIP). She is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature.
Contributions: Andonis Piperoglou
Andonis Piperoglou is an adjunct research fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Australia. He is a cultural historian who examines the interrelationship between migration, race, and ethnicity across settler-colonial worlds and is interested in bringing Mediterranean and Pacific histories into conversation. He has published widely in various scholarly outputs, including the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of Australian Studies, History Australia, Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, Australian Historical Studies, and the Australian Journal of Politics and History. He currently serves on the Executive of the International Australian Studies Association and was recently awarded an Australian National University Herbert and Valmae Freilich Early Career Research Grant. Andonis is also a cofounder of the Australian Migration History Network, Australia’s chief national body for migration history.
Contributions: Fevronia K. Soumakis
Fevronia K. Soumakis taught in the history and education program at Teachers College, Columbia University, until 2019. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor in the European Languages and Literatures Department at Queens College, City University of New York. Her academic research interests include the history of education, immigration and ethnicity, and religion and education. She has recently completed a coedited volume titled Educating Greek Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and was past Program Chair for Division F, History and Historiography, of the American Educational Research Association.
Contributions: Sostene Massimo Zangari
Sostene Massimo Zangari specializes in US ethnic writing between the wars. He has published articles on Herman Melville, Richard Wright, Michael Gold, and John Fante. He has coauthored two studies on American culture and literature, Americana: Storie e culture degli Stati Uniti dalla A alla Z (Il Saggiatore, 2012), and Guida alla letteratura degli Stati Uniti (Odoya, 2014).
Contributions: Francesca de Lucia
Francesca de Lucia taught at Minzu University in Beijing from 2016 to 2020 and previously worked as associate professor at Zhejiang Normal University of China in Jinhua. Her book Italian American Cultural Fictions: From Diaspora to Globalization was published by Peter Lang in 2017. Her research focuses on ethnicity and American identity in literature, with a particular concentration on the work of Italian American and Chinese American authors.
