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Contributors John Allan Cicala earned his doctorate in Folklore and American Studies at the Folklore Institute, Indiana University. He has published in material culture theory, urban folklore, and Italian folklife genres within the American experience. Currently, he is preparing a field-based study on Michigan’s Italian folk traditions that will be published by Michigan State University Press. Simone Cinotto holds a Ph.D. in American history and teaches twentieth-century history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo (Italy), American history at the University of Turin, and Italian American studies at New York University. He is the author of Una famiglia che mangia insieme: Cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920–1940 (Otto, 2001) and Soft Soil Black Grape: Labor, Social Capital, and Race in the Experience of Italian Winemakers in California, which will be published by New York University Press. Luisa Del Giudice, Ph.D., ethnographer and oral historian, was founder and director of the Italian Oral History Institute in Los Angeles (1994–2007) and professor of Italian folklore at UCLA (1995–2001). She has published widely, has produced many public events in Los Angeles, and is an honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society and Cavaliere of the Italian Republic. Joseph J. Inguanti has a Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale and is a professor of art history at Southern Connecticut State University. He maintains that the landscape—whether expressed in real space, in memory, in literature, or in material culture—plays a profound role in the construction of Italian-American identity. His research explores the meaning and history of the actual landscapes, imaginary landscapes, Italian-American grave-tending, and representations of landscapes in textiles and ephemeral art of Italian Americans. Marion S. Jacobson earned her doctorate in music with a specialization in ethnomusicology from New York University. She has taught undergraduate courses in world music, Western music history, and world civilizations at New York University, SUNY New Paltz, and the Albany College of Pharmacy. She is currently working on a book entitled Squeeze This! Accordion Culture in the United States in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2011), which traces the piano accordion’s popularity. Sabina Magliocco is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Northridge. A pioneering scholar of modern Paganisms, she is the author of Witching Culture: Folklore and Neopaganism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and numerous other books and articles. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Guggenheim and Hewlett foundations. She is an honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society. Lara Pascali holds a B.A. in Italian studies and a M. Arch. in domestic environments from McGill University, and an M.A. in early American culture from the University of Delaware. Her training and research draw upon vernacular architecture, folklore, cultural landscape, and material culture studies to examine human relationships with the material world. Peter Savastano holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in religion and society from Drew University. He is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Seton Hall University. 247 248 Contributors Dr. Savastano’s research interests include religion and sexuality; lived religion within the Africanbased traditions of the Americas; Italian-American Roman Catholic devotional practices; and altered states of consciousness. Joan L. Saverino is the Director of Education and Outreach at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania , where she created and directs PhilaPlace (www.philaplace.org), a collaborative neighborhood history and culture project. Saverino has a masters from the George Washington University and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work also appears in the edited volume Global Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2010). Kenneth Scambray is professor of English at the University of La Verne. His poetry appears regularly in national reviews. His most recent two works are Surface Roots: Stories (Guernica, 2004) and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). Joseph Sciorra earned his doctorate in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania and is the associate director of Academic and Cultural Programs at Queens College’s John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He is editor of the social science journal Italian American Review, co-editor of poet Vincenzo Ancona’s bilingual anthology Malidittu la lingua/Damned Language (Legas, 1990; republished 2010), and author of R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art (Henry Holt & Co., 1994; Thames and Hudson, 2002). As the avatar ‘‘Joey...

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