Friday, November 22 | 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Dana Building | Room 1040
The Henderson Room (Third floor) @ Michigan League
911 N University Ave, Ann Arbor
The event is free and open to the public. RSVP here.
Food has been a vital factor in the experience of Italian immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century as well as the American-born generations of their children and grandchildren. Food provided them with a widely shared means of cultural identification, social cohesion, and economic opportunities. Italian American family and community life were centered on food rituals such as Italian Sunday Dinner. After having been seen with suspect at the beginning of the century, Italian restaurants and American popular culture popularized immigrant cuisine among Americans of non-Italian descent, making food an inescapable feature of the public identity of Italian Americans.
Even much of the transnational relationships with the diasporic home across the Atlantic was actually based on food, as food has always represented a most relevant share of Italian exports to the United States. Since the 1970s, a new, smaller, group of Italian immigrants—chefs, cookbook writers, TV show hosts—has introduced a new template of Italian cuisine in America, insisting on the notion of authenticity, and becoming an integral and dynamic part of the American “food revolution.” Arguably nothing more and better than food represents Italian America, its history, and the continuous two-way flows of people, goods, and ideas between Italy and the United States in the twentieth century and beyond.
Simone Cinotto is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche in Pollenzo, Italy, where he is the Director of the master’s program “Master of Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility.” He has been Visiting Professor at Indiana University (2017), the Department of Italian Studies at New York University (2008-2010), and the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London (2015-2019). He has also been Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU (2013-2015) and Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2004).
For more details and to RSVP, click here.
Organized by the Dante Alighieri Society of Michigan, the Consulate of Italy in Detroit, and the Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago in collaboration with the Italian American Club of Livonia Charitable Foundation (IACLCF) and the Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan.
