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Italian Americans and Television--CFP for an edited anthology
| Call for Papers Date: | 2012-09-30 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2012-04-03 |
| Announcement ID: |
193719 |
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Italian Americans and Television
Call for Papers for an edited volume
Italian Americans have been a consistent presence on U.S. television screens since the medium’s rise to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. Fictional Italian American families have anchored shows like The Sopranos and Everybody Loves Raymond. Italian American characters have played prominent roles in everything from reality TV to medical melodramas to situation comedies to live television anthologies. Italian American showrunners like Steven Bochco and Tom Fontana have overseen some of the medium’s most critically-acclaimed programs. Even in news coverage, Italian Americans have been a recurring interest with sports figures, politicians, gangsters, and others helping to define Italian American ethnicity for a general television audience.
However, while some attention has been given to Italian Americans in cinema, little scholarship exists on the wealth of historical and contemporary topics related to Italian Americans and TV. The research that has been done tends to focus on issues related to representations of the mafia and anti-defamation critiques of seemingly stereotypical images. Although we are interested in multi-layered readings of such topics, papers that look at other subjects, while being mindful of issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class would be particularly appealing.
Ultimately, this book proposes to investigate the eclectic nature of Italian Americans’ presence on and in television in order to develop a preliminary and useful history of their televisual presence. In doing so, we hope to better understand the relative acceptance of one white ethnic group in U.S. society and the ways in which the broadcasting of Italian American ethnicity relates to that of other ethnic/racial groups. This transdisciplinary anthology will approach the topic from a number of critical theoretical models.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• Representations of Italian Americans on television programs, especially in relation to stereotypes and/or how Italian American history has been documented
• Reception of Italian American characters or Italian American-focused shows
• Italian Americans and other ethnic groups
• Use of Italian, dialects, and Italian American colloquialisms on U.S. television
• Novel and theater adaptations for television
• Histories of specific shows or characters, especially in relation to issues of gender, class, and ethnicity
• Italian Americans in leadership roles within industry guilds and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
• Italian Americans across media formats (including, from radio to television; from television to the Internet; and broadcast vs. cable)
• Italian American showrunners, writers, directors and producers (Steven Bochco, David Chase, Tom Fontana, etc.)
• News coverage of Italian Americans, including televised coverage of gangster trials and celebrities in the news
• Television advertising and the representation of Italian American ethnicity and/or Italian language and culture
• Protests of Italian American representations by Italian American groups
• Italian American sports figures vis-à-vis television programming
• Italian Americans on television outside of the U.S. (exporting shows, influencing foreign programs, etc.)
• Italian television programming in the U.S. (i.e., Italian films aired on U.S. television stations).
Deadline for submissions: SEPTEMBER 30, 2012. Abstracts (up to 500 words) and a brief curriculum vitae should be emailed to the editors, Laura E. Ruberto (lruberto@peralta.edu) and Jonathan J. Cavallero (jcavalle@uark.edu), to whom other enquiries may also be addressed. Abstracts should clearly display the knowledge of previous research and should indicate theoretical perspectives. Authors may expect to be advised of their acceptance or otherwise by December 2012. The editors will be seeking a publisher for the collection shortly afterward.
EDITORS
Jonathan J. Cavallero
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of Arkansas
jcavalle@uark.edu
Jonathan J. Cavallero is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas. He is the author Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers (University of Illinois Press, 2011), and his essays have appeared in several journals including The Journal of Film and Video and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.
Laura E. Ruberto
Professor and Chair
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Berkeley City College
lruberto@peralta.edu
Laura E. Ruberto’s co-edited volumes include Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2007) and Bakhtin and the Nation (Bucknell University Press, 1998); she is the author of Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy & the US (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). She co-edits the book series “Critical Studies in Italian America” at Fordham University Press and is the Film and Digital Media Review Editor for the Italian American Review.
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