Contributors

WILLIAM BOELHOWER is a member of the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. He has recently published “Literature and Migration,” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, Serie Occidentale 54 (2020); a revised and enlarged edition of Immigrant Autobiography in the United States (2021); “‘Liberty or Death!’ An Archaeology of the Freedom Narrative in the Age of Revolution,” The New Centennial Review 22.3 (2022); “Decolonization, Diversity and Accountability: The Role of Museums in Democracies of the Global north,” Atlantic Studies 21.1 (2024); “Narrating and Archiving Social Movements and Migrations,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (forthcoming); and “Borderline Stories: Migrants at the Center of World History,” in The Bloomsbury Handboook of Anglophone Literature and Migration: Critical and Creative Voices (2025), which he co-edited along with Nicoletta Vallorani and Simona Bertacco.ELISA BORDIN is associate professor of American literature and culture at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. Her research deals with the western; the literatures of minorities and of migration; and Blackness. Her latest publications include the special issue “California: immaginazione e disastro,” Ácoma 26 (2024, with Vincenzo Bavaro); the volume Chris Abani (2022, with Annalisa Oboe), on the global Igbo writer Chris Abani; the special issue “Cinema and Migration,” Iperstoria 17 (2021, with Simone Francescato). Since 2023 she has directed “Literary California, 1884–2022: Spaces of Exception, Spaces of Disaster,” a research project funded by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research.CRISTINA DI MAIO is assistant professor in American literature at the University of Turin, Italy. She received her PhD from the University of Macerata, and she has taught American literature and culture at the Universities “L'Orientale” and “Federico II” in Naples. She is the author of contributions on contemporary American women writers, coming of age, young adult fiction and pop culture; in 2021 she published her first book on games and play in Toni Cade Bambara, Rita Ciresi, and Grace Paley's short fiction. Her research interests include Italian American cultural narratives, feminist theory and criticism, and TV seriality.CARLA FRANCELLINI is an associate professor of Anglo-American literature and literary translation in the Department of Literary Criticism and Philology at the University of Siena (Italy). She is the author of Visible/Invisible. Incursioni nella narrativa italiana americana contemporanea (2018) and editor of the book series Miraggi/Loomings for Artemide, dedicated to the publication of Italian American criticism and literature. She has published extensively on Sylvia Plath, J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf, Harold Bloom, Herman Melville, Pietro di Donato, Maria Gillan, Tony Ardizzone, Mary Caponegro, Paola Corso, Adria Bernardi, Lisa Ruffolo. She edited the volumes Uè Paisà. Racconti dall'identità italoamericana (2012), Women in Love. Donne in traduzione (2014), Re-Mapping Italian America: Places, Cultures, Identities (2018, with Sabrina Vellucci), Mother Cabrini. Riflessioni sulle migrazioni di ieri e di oggi (2023, with Elisabetta Marino), Maria Gillan. Poesie dall'Italia (2024), and From Ethnics to American (2024). Her research interests include Italian American literature, twentieth-century ethnic literatures, translation and adaptation studies, and Melville studies.FRED L. GARDAPHÉ 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, Italy, 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: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer, Moustache Pete is Dead!, Leaving Little Italy, and From Wiseguys to Wise Men: Masculinities and the Italian American Gangster. He has completed a study of humor and irony in Italian American culture that will be published by Penn State University Press.GEORGE GUIDA is a past president of the Italian American Studies Association, professor in English at New York City College of Technology, and author of eleven books.MARGHERITA LANZA is a PhD student at the University of Heidelberg, where she is working on a project on queerness in 1928 literature in English. She holds an MA in English and American Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg. Her master's thesis is a comparative analysis of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.ENRICO MARIANI is adjunct professor of American Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and previously taught Anglo-American literature at the University of Naples Federico II and at Roma Tre University, where he also earned his PhD. His dissertation was awarded the 2024 Agostino Lombardo Award by AISNA (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani). He has published articles and chapters on Louis Adamic, John Fante, Carlos Bulosan, John Steinbeck, Gina Apostol, Upton Sinclair, and the book Americani di seconda classe. La dialettica del melting-pot in Louis Adamic, Carlos Bulosan e John Fante (2025).MICHAIL C. MARKODIMITRAKIS is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Work, Hellenic Mediterranean University, specializing in refugee rights, media, and culture in the Mediterranean. He holds a PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, where he completed his dissertation on refugee reception and integration in Greece under full scholarship. His current research employs ethnographic fieldwork to examine migration, humanitarian governance, and public discourse in the Southern Mediterranean. His publications explore themes of contested identities, migration narratives, and cultural representations in literature and film, with work appearing in edited collections from Routledge and Fordham University Press. He has presented at international conferences on topics related to international law, migration, and cultural studies. A recipient of the Humanity in Action fellowship and multiple research grants, he has taught courses in ethnic studies, community-based participatory research, migration, and English literature at both Bowling Green State University and Hellenic Mediterranean University.THEODORA PATRONA teaches literary courses at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has published numerous articles and chapters on Greek American and Italian American literature and film and regularly reviews for journals and sites abroad. She is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth Century Greek American and Italian American Literature (2017) and the co-editor of Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (2022; winner of the Vassiliki Karagiannaki MGSA award for originality). She is interested in the interweaving of identity and gender.