Introduction
Stefano Morello (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
The Italian American Studies Open Syllabus (IASOS) is a crowd-sourced digital collection of remixable resources to explore and teach the Italian diaspora in the United States. Organized by keyword, each entry offers an introductory curatorial overview alongside a selection of resources encompassing academic and non-academic texts, cultural artifacts, educational materials, and multimedia content. The goal of this digital publication is to provide educators and private citizens alike with organized, easily accessible resources on Italian American history, literature, and popular culture. It responds to both the lack of Open Educational Resources (OER) focusing on the Italian American experience, and a growing interest among Italian Americans to engage with and understand their heritage and identity more deeply.
Contrary to what its name might imply, the IASOS is not a collection of syllabi but rather a comprehensive syllabus in itself, comprising various modules on different topics. A reader can read entries comprehensively, as they would a printed collection, access them discreetly, as they would consult an encyclopedia, or use the resources collected by each editor as a gateway into their chosen topic. For instance, a K-12 or college teacher with no specialized knowledge in Italian American Studies can leverage one or more entries to enrich their curriculum, bypassing the need for extensive research on the topic. Similarly, individuals outside academic circles seeking to learn about key aspects of the Italian American experience may find the curatorial statement and the recommended readings a valuable starting point for further engagement with a given topic.
The inaugural set of keywords, published in April 2024, was chosen not based on their priority but on the availability of contributors, with plans to expand the repository as new contributions are received. IASOS is dedicated to representing a broad spectrum of voices within the Italian American community, including critical questions around race, gender, and class, and reflections on inter-ethnic relationships. If you are engaged in research related to the Italian American experience or possess expertise in a yet-to-be-covered keyword and are interested in contributing, please visit the “Contribute” section.
As an iterative and evolving digital publication embracing the principles of OER, the IASOS naturally found its home on the City University of New York’s instance of Manifold, an open-source platform for scholarly publishing designed for hybrid forms of scholarship. The platform excels in integrating diverse types of content—textual, visual, graphic, and multimedia—from various locations into a cohesive experience. Further, as Krystyna Michael, Jojo Karlin, and Matthew K. Gold have suggested, Manifold facilitates a direct, flexible publishing process conducive to the continual development of such an OER (2023).
The decision to publish the IASOS on a CUNY-hosted platform not only leverages Manifold’s affordances but also aligns the project with an institution that has played a significant role in the advancement of several generations of Italian Americans. While the relationship between CUNY and the Italian American community has been complex—marked by historical challenges such as Joseph Lombardo’s 1942 first discrimination lawsuit and the enduring Kibbee 1976 memorandum that recognized Italian Americans as an affirmative action group within the university system (Kirillova 2016)—CUNY has unarguably played a significant role in the advancement of Italian Americans through generations. Some notable Italian American CUNY alumni include activists like Mario Savio and Arthur Gatti, scholars such as Richard Gambino, Michael Parenti, Tony Picciano, and Joseph Sciorra, actors Ray Romano and Dominic Chianese, as well as writers Mario Puzo, Donna Masini, Ned Vizzini, among many others. Likewise, my mission to preserve and recover the Italian American archive has been significantly upheld by the financial and intellectual support I have received from various programs and individuals across The CUNY Graduate Center, for which I am deeply grateful. In addition to the institutional support I received for my Lung Block project (Morello and Culhane 2021) and the ongoing recovery and digitalization of several Italian American publications, the development of the IASOS itself was also made possible by a grant by the PublicsLab program at the Graduate Center.
I wish to end this brief note by acknowledging my debt of gratitude towards mentors like Eric Lott, Duncan Faherty, and Steve Brier. Their encouragement to "look at the bigger picture" and to use the specificities of the Italian American experience as a lens to view the broader threads and patterns in American cultural and social history has substantially shaped my approach to the field. I'm equally grateful to Matthew K. Gold and Lisa M. Rhody for their unwavering support in every aspect of my journey as a Digital Humanities practitioner, and to Martino Marazzi, Samuele Pardini, and Joseph Sciorra for their continued guidance on all-things-Italian-America. Most importantly, my deepest thanks go to all the contributors to this project.