CLCS Faculty and Graduate Student Present at the National MELUS Conference

Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and doctoral student Federico Tiberini recently showcased their research on Italian American culture at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), held in Austin, Texas and co-sponsored by the University of Texas-Austin and Southern Methodist University.

Founded in 1973, MELUS endeavors to expand the definition of U.S. literature, more broadly conceived through the study and teaching of Latino, First Nations, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts. Building a community of writers and scholars of American ethnic literatures, the conference brought together 245 participants from across the United States, offering a vibrant forum for multiethnic literary and cultural scholarship. Providing valuable visibility for research emerging from the University of Arkansas, the work of Calabretta-Sajder and Tiberini highlights how graduate study at the University of Arkansas comes together to advance cutting-edge scholarship in Italian American studies.

Calabretta-Sajder, who holds the Professor Antonio Marinoni and Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Endowed Chair in Italian and is director of the International and Global Studies Program, organized two sessions: "Translingual Futures: Queer Italian Diasporic Narratives in Language and Laughter" and "From Kitchens to Cameras: Intersections of Food, Image, and Italian American Self-Making." These sessions foregrounded Italian American cultural theory by examining how foodways, visual culture, and embodied identity work together in film and literature to construct, negotiate, and transform Italian American subjectivities across generations, genders and queer experiences.

Building directly on his coursework at Arkansas, Tiberini presented "Tastes of Transition: Food, Identity, and Generational Change in Big Night and Dinner Rush," a project that originated as a research paper in ITAL 51403: Tracing the Italian American Experience. His talk analyzed how two landmark Italian American films use food and restaurant spaces to explore questions of assimilation, family conflict, and cultural memory. The trajectory from graduate seminar paper to national conference presentation underscores the vital role of the Italian American class in preparing students to contribute original research to an international scholarly community.

Calabretta-Sajder also presented "Feasting on Grief: Queer Materiality, Foodways, and Italian American Cultural Theory in Lanzillotto's Works," focusing on Annie Rachele Lanzillotto's memoir L is for Lion and her poetry collection Schistsong. His paper examined how Lanzillotto's representations of food, family, and trauma reshape Italian American cultural narratives through a queer theoretical lens. Together, his and Tiberini's projects demonstrate WLLC and CLCS's commitment to mentoring graduate students as research partners and to expanding conversations around diaspora, gender, and sexuality in Italian American and Italian diaspora studies.