by John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

We are happy to announce that JoAnne Ruvoli will be serving as the film and digital media review editor of the Italian American Review beginning January 2017.

JoAnne's academic training and interests include American literary traditions, film and gender studies, as well as Italian American studies. She received her Ph.D. in American literature with an interdepartmental concentration in Gender and Women's Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2011. She currently teaches at Ball State University, in Indiana. Previously, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, that focused on "Cultures in Transnational Perspective."

She has published articles and reviews on early cinema, Jane Addams's Hull House, Italian American literary texts, and transnational circuits. In 2008 she also co-edited a special issue on Mario Puzo for Voices in Italian Americana. She is currently finishing a book based on her doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled Framing Ethnicity: Storytelling in Italian American Novels, which locates Italian American novels from the post-civil rights era in the canonical American literary tradition. She also started research on the relationship between ethnicity and the popular Vamp figure during the silent film era. In addition to her many academic accomplishments, JoAnne also has extensive editorial experience, having worked for four years as Assistant Editor at the fiction journal Other Voices. Welcome, JoAnne!

We wish to express our gratitude to outgoing film and digital media review editor Laura E. Ruberto, who has been with the IAR since the journal was relaunched six years ago and whose hard work and vision have been vital to the IAR's success. Laura will be joining the journal's editorial board.

The Italian American Review (IAR), a bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College (City University of New York), publishes scholarly articles about the history and culture of Italian Americans as well as other aspects of the Italian diaspora. The current iteration of the journal commenced publication in 2011, when the Calandra Institute relaunched the IAR with an eye towards enhancing its scholarly rigor. The journal showcases writing on topics including migration, labor, race and ethnicity, gender studies, and the production of expressive culture (cinema, music, religious feasts), among others. The IAR publishes book reviews, film and digital media reviews, exhibition reviews, and occasionally "Notes and Documents." The IAR does not publish literary criticism or creative work such as poetry, fiction, or memoir. For more information about the journal, click here.