Loyola University Chicago

Kathleen M. Adams is a Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago and an Adjunct Curator at the Field Museum of Natural History and is teaching at the Rome Center this year. Previously she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Beloit College, where she held the Mouat Family Endowed Chair in International Studies. She is the author of Art as Power: Recrafting Identities, Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia (Univ. of Hawaii Press 2006), and co-editor of Home and Hegemony: Domestic Work and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000). She has also published articles on inter-ethnic relations, cultural representations, art and tourism in a variety of edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including American Ethnologist, Ethnology, Ethnohistory, Museum Anthropology, Cultural Survival Quarterly and Annals of Tourism Research. Dr. Adams has received fellowships from various foundations including Fulbright and the American Philosophical Society and was awarded Loyola University's Sujack Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007. Currently she serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Association for Asian Studies and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Fr. Albert M. Anuszewski, O.SS.T., was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and entered the Trinitarian Order in 1981. He received his BA in history and philosophy from Loyola College in Maryland in 1986. He professed his Solemn Vows as a Trinitarian in 1988 and received his M.Div and M.A. in Ecclesiastical History from the Washington Theological Union in 1991. Since his ordination in 1991, he has served as a parochial vicar in Victoria, TX as well as Director of Vocations for his Province for over nine years. Fr. Albert taught at DeMatha Catholic High school in Hyattsville, MD where he also served as the Director of Campus Ministry for six years. In 2004, Fr. Albert was appointed a pastor in New Jersey, where he oversaw the merger of several parishes and served on the Bishop’s Presbyteral Council. In June 2007 he was elected to the Trinitarian Order’s General Council and General Treasurer of the Order and his lived in Rome since August of 2007.

Some of Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum’s books, awards, and achievements suggest the several streams she is simultaneously navigating in the contemporary world paradigm shift:  Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy (1986, 1988). Black Madonnas. Feminism, Politics, and Religion in Italy (1994, italian edition 1997). Premio Internazionale di Saggistica S. Valitutti (2008).  African American Educators Hall of Fame (1996).  Dark mother. African origins and godmothers (200l; italian edition La Madre O-Scura 2004; african~french edition La Mere Noire 2007).  Founding mother award for women's Spirituality program, California Institute of Integral Studies (2003). African~french Menaibuc Editions award: ‘Grand Protectrice des Nations Negres’ (2008). Work in Progress, The Future has an Ancient Heart. Transformational legacy of caring and sharing on african migration paths throughout the world (2010).  Lucia’s view of her most significant achievement:  she is a nonna of nine and bisnonna of toddler Josephine Lucia, named for Lucia’s sicilian grandmothers.

Anna Maria Crispino is a journalist with a sort of double life: she worked for nearly 30 years on foreign news and international issues, traveling in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Meanwhile, in 1996 she founded the women's journal “Leggendaria. Libri Letture Linguaggi” (73 issues up to now). She is one of the founding members of the Società Italiana delle Letterate (SIL, Italian Society of Women in Literatures) and in the organizing committee of the annual “Seminario Estivo Residenziale SIL” (Annual SIL Summer Residential Seminar) now heading to the X° edition (Frascati, 12-14 June 2009). For the last two years she has been working as editor for the publishing house Iacobelli. Essayist and translator, she has recently edited: Rosi Braidotti, “Trasposizioni” (Luca Sossella editore, Roma 2008) and “La scrittura della differenza 2008. Testi della IV Biennale Internazionale di Drammaturgia Femminile” (Iacobelli, Roma 2008).    

Lidia Curti has been teaching women and postcolonial studies at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ and is now Honorary Professor of English in the same university. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, the president of AIA (Association Italiana di Anglistica) and member of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English), Visiting Professor at the University of Birmingham (G.B.), and at the University of California at Santa Cruz, US.  She is presently a member of the editorial board of Anglistica, Feminist Review, New Formations and Parol. She is the author of Female Stories, Female Bodies (Macmillan 1998; New York U. P. 1999) and La voce dell’altra (Meltemi 2006) and co-editor of The Postcolonial Question (Routledge 1996), La nuova Shahrazad (Liguori 2004), Speaking of Cinema, Speaking with Cinema (Anglistica, 2007), and Schermi indiani, linguaggi planetari (Aracne 2008).  She is presently working on migrant writings in Italian.

Roberto Derobertis (1977) studied Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bari, where he completed his PhD in ‘Italianistica’ (Italian Studies) in April 2007 with a dissertation entitled “‘Migrant Writings’: Literary Displacements and New Configurations”. He has widely published on Italian migrant writings and at the moment he is temporary research fellow at the Department of Italian Studies at University of Bari with a research programme on “Italian colonial literature”. He works in research fields such as literary criticism and theory, comparative literature, cultural, postcolonial and women studies.

Flaminio Di Biagi, full-time Professor of Italian at Loyola University Chicago Rome Center since 1989, graduated from the University of Rome with a doctorate in comparative literature, holds a Ph.D. in Italian literature from New York University and a Master of Arts in Romance Languages from the University of Washington. He has published three books: “Sotto l’arco di Tito: le ‘Farfalle’ di Gozzano”, an essay of literary criticism on the early 1900s poet Guido Gozzano; “Il cinema a Roma: guida alla storia e ai luoghi dei cinema nella capitale”, a volume on the history of film production in/about the city of Rome from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th (it also contains a helpful appendix of sites in or near Rome where various films have been shot); “La Roma di Fellini” a study on the famous Italian Director. Dr. Di Biagi has taught Italian (Language, Film, and Literature) in several American Universities (most recently as Visiting Professor at the College of Charleston, at Loyola University Chicago, and at St. John’s University), he has published articles on Italian writers and Cinema, various essays on Italian-American studies, and has translated classic authors such as Conrad (“Heart of Darkness”, “The Secret Sharer”, “Tales of Unrest”), London (“The Game”), and D.H. Lawrence(“Kangaroo”) from English into Italian. He also edited critical editions of Herman Melville's “Billy Budd”, and Guido Gozzano’s “Verso la cuna del mondo: lettere dall’India”. He often writes for “America Oggi” (an Italian-American daily), is a member of the Editorial Board of “The Waters of Hermes” (a literary journal), director of a film-series for La Finestra Publishing Co., and collaborated with the Museum of Cinema of Rome.

Nawal El Saadawi is a renowned International Egyptian writer, novelist, psychiatrist and fighter   for the rights of women and the working poor.  She started writing when she was 13 years old.  She published over 40   books, reprinted and reissued in Arabic, widely read in her country and all Arab countries.  She has achieved widespread international recognition after the translation of   her work to over 30 languages.  Her most famous novel, Woman at Point Zero was published in Beirut in 1973.  It was followed in 1976 by God Dies by the Nile and in 1977 by The Hidden Face of Eve:  Women in the Arab World.  In 1981 Nawal El Saadawi publicly criticized President Anwar Sadat policies and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned.  In 1982, she established (AWSA )  the Arab Women's Solidarity Association.  The Egyptian  Branch  of  AWSA   was outlawed in 1991 by  the  government.  Her name appeared on a fundamentalist death list,  after  publishing her  novel The Fall of the Imam in  Cairo in 1988.  She was obliged to leave her  country for some years.  The last case Nawal El Saadawi won on 13 May 2008 demanded the withdrawal of her Egyptian Nationality, after publishing her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting by Madbouli publishers in Cairo 2007.  In 2004 she presented herself as a candidate   for the presidential elections in Egypt.  In July 2005, however, she was forced to withdraw her candidacy in the face of ongoing government persecution.  She declared that her move was symbolic to expose the lack of democracy.  er books are taught in universities across the world. Her most recent novel, entitled:  Zina, The Stolen Novel, in Arabic and French in 2008.

Valentina Gentile is Associate Researcher at the Center for Ethics and Global Politics of Luiss University of Rome. She received her Ph.D. degree with honors in Political Theory from Luiss University, for her dissertation on “From Identity Conflict to Civil Society: the role of Civil Society in building peace through the protection of human dignity and pluralism”. She also holds a Master’s (Italian) Degree cum laude in Political Sciences- International Relations from Luiss University. From September 2007 to March 2008, she was Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre for Conflict Studies, University of Utrecht (Netherland). The fellowship was part of an international project funded by European Union (under the FP VI ), “Humanitarian Action and Conflict Studies: Bridging the Gap between European Research, Policy and Practice” HUMCRICON Consortium. From July 2006, she has been enrolled as researcher in SHUR project, “Human Rights in Conflict: the role of civil society”. It is an international research project, Specific Targeted Research Project- STREP, funded by the Sixth Framework Programme-FP6 of the European Commission. In the last five years, her research has focused on political theory and its application to contemporary political issues, such as new internal conflicts, massive human rights violations and abuses, ethnic and religious hatreds and new forms of nationalism, international/global governance, emergence of new civil society actors. In her work, she developed an approach based on the integration of different methods of analysis, drawn on sociology, political science, and anthropology, developed in the light of the broader framework offered by political philosophy. Furthermore, she always sought to enrich her theoretical horizons of empirical case studies and qualitative researches.

Gabriella Ghermandi was born in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) in 1965, and she moved to Italy in 1979. Since then she has lived in Bologna, birthplace of her father. In 1999 she won the 1st Prize at the Eks&Tra Literary Prize for migrant writers, organized by Fara Editore. Several Ghermandi's works have been published in journals, magazines and collections. She writes and interprets her storytelling performances following the metaphor’s art, typical of the Ethiopic cultural tradition. For two years she has been the art director of the Evocamondi Festival, World Music and Storytelling event, organized in Bentivoglio, nearby Bologna and she was also one of the coordinators of the Paths crossroads events with migrant writers. She is also one of the founders (and member of the Editorial Board) of the online literary journal El Ghibli. In 2007 her debut novel Queen of pearls and flowers, based on the stories of the Ethiopian patriots fighting against Italian occupation, was published by Donzelli and won the Popoli in Cammino prize and Premio letterario Armando La Torre Città di Siderno.

After studying Islamic theology and law and working with a team to produce a German translation of the Qur'an with commentary notes, Halima Krausen succeeded her teacher, Imam Mehdi Razvi, as the spiritual leader of the German-speaking Muslim community in Hamburg. She is a founding member and president of the Initiative for Islamic Studies and teaches at Hamburg University as well as in various study circles in Germany and Britain. Besides, she is involved in intrfaith projects in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.

Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli is a founder of American Studies in Italy and one of the first Professors of American Literature in Italy since 1968. Lecturer and Professor at University of Cornell, Berkley and Duke. Director of the Special Projects Section at Fulbright Commission from 1952 to 1957.  She is the first woman in Italy to take charge of the Dean Office at Università degli Studi Roma Tre in 1992. She held the chair until 1998 and was later appointed Dean at IUSM, from 1998 to 2003. She was appointed Professor Emeritus on March 24, 2004

Dr. Gabriella Lazaridis is senior lecturer in European and Migration Studies at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, UK. She has been an elected member of the executive board of the European Sociological Association, has researched and  published extensively in the fields of gender, migration in Europe and the implementation of EU policies in southern Europe. She is currently writting two books, one on women migrants from Albania in Greece and another one on international migration in Europe.

Sarah Fiona Maclaren has taught at the John Felice Rome Center since 1999. She earned her PhD in philosophy at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, and her laurea in cultural and social anthropology at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Author of the books Magni cenza e mondo classico (Rome, 2003) and La magni cenza e il suo doppio. Il pensiero estetico di Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Milan, 2005), Professor Maclaren’s current fields of research include social and cultural aspects of traditional crafts and “studio crafts” in Italy and Japan, and aesthetic concepts in contemporary Japanese architecture.

Áine O’Healy is Professor of Italian and Director of the Humanities Program at Loyola Marymount University. Her research interests include Italian cinema, visual culture, feminist theory and immigration studies. Her recent publications include Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, edited with Katarzyna a Marciniak and Anikó Imre and published by Palgrave in 2007.  She is currently coediting a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on ‘Transcultural Mediations and Transnational Politics of Difference,’ and her book on contemporary cinema, ‘National Cinema in a Transnational Landscape,’ is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

Maria Palazzesi comes from an historical education.  She has carried our collaborations and research activities for many universities, research institutions, public and private organizations, with a special focus in the field of the contemporary history of labor.  Specializing in editing and in library studies, she was a member of "The Women's Bookstore" of Rome.  Maria is now one of the founders of the cultural association "Zora Neale Hurston," created to widen women's knowledge through the organization and promotion of events, meetings, and training.  As an instructor and cultural operator, she worked on the realization and production of local and international projects for the Rome Council and other organizations. She is responsible for the Cultural Sector at the International Women's House of Rome.

Tracy Pintchman is Director of the International Studies program and Professor of religious studies at Loyola University Chicago.  She focuses on the study of South Asian religions, especially Hindu traditions.  Her publications include about 30 articles, book chapters, essays, and encyclopedia entries; two monographs, The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (1994) and Guests at God's Wedding:  Celebrating Kartik among the Women of Benares (2005); and two edited volumes, Seeking Mahadevi:  Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess (2001) and Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition (forthcoming 2007). 

Wendy Pojmann (Loyola Class of 1991) is Assistant Professor of modern European history at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She is the author of Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Ashgate 2006; Aracne Editrice 2008) and editor of Migration and Activism in Europe since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).  Her articles about women’s movements, immigration, and oral history have appeared in The Historian, the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, and Migration Letters.  Pojmann is the 2008 recipient of the Barbieri grant in modern Italian history from Trinity College and the 2006 Yosef Wosk research grant.

Natalia Ribas-Mateos is now a Ramón y Cajal Reseacher at the Universidad de A Coruña (ESOMI, Equipo de Sociología de las migraciones internacionales) and visiting professor at the University of Meknes in Morocco. During 2009 her main research was centered on remittances, gender and border spaces (particularly in the Moroccan Jebala and the twin cities of El Paso-Juárez). Her latest individual published work was The Mediterranean in the Age of Globalization. Migration, welfare and borders (Transaction Publishers, 2005).

Caterina Romeo is Assistant Professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where she teaches Gender Studies and American Studies.  She is the author of Narrative tra due sponde: Memoir di italiane d'America (Rome: Carocci, 2005) and has co-edited a double monographic issue of Dialectical Anthropology on contemporary migrations in Europe and a monographic issue of tutteStorie on Italian American women. She has translated into Italian Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo (Nutrimenti, 2006) and Kym Ragusa’s The Skin between Us (La pelle che ci separa; Nutrimenti, 2008). She is currently working on a book project on migrant and post-migrant women writers in contemporary Italy.

Dr. Susan A. Ross is a Professor of Theology and a Faculty Scholar at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of For the Beauty of the Earth: Women, Sacramentality and Justice (Paulist, 2006) and  Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (Continuum,1998), numerous journal articles and book chapters, and the co-editor of five books and journal issues. She is the recipient of a Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant, the Book of the Year Award from the College Theology Society in 1999, and the Ann O'Hara Graff Award of the Women’s Seminar of the Catholic Theological Society of America. She currently serves as Chairperson of the Department of Theology.

Peter J. Schraeder is professor in the Department of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago where he is a specialist of comparative foreign policy theory, United States and European foreign policies toward Africa and the Middle East, African politics and foreign policy (including North Africa), and intervention in world politics and international democracy promotion. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tunis in Tunisia (2002-03) and at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal (1994-96), in addition to holding appointments at Somali National University (1985), the U.S. Embassy in Djibouti (1987), the French Institute of African Research in Zimbabwe (1996), the University of the Antilles in Guadeloupe (1999), and the John Felice Rome Center in Italy (2003-05). His scholarship is published in such diverse journals as African Affairs, The Journal of Modern African Studies, The Journal of Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Middle East Journal, Politique Africaine, and World Politics. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Globalization and Emerging Trends in African Foreign Policy: A Comparative Perspective of Eastern Africa (2007), African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transformation (2^nd ed., 2004), Exporting Democracy: Rhetoric vs. Reality (2002), United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis, and Change (1994), and Intervention into the 1990s: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward the Third World (1992). He is currently working on two books, African Foreign Policy: Democratization and its Impacts and The Cross, the Crescent and the Ballot Box: Catholic and Islamic Perspectives on International Democracy Promotion.

Marguerite Waller is Professor of Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Her articles in the areas of feminist theory, contemporary women’s activism, Italian and Central European cinema, new media, border art, feminist performance, and European Renaissance literature have been widely published, and she is the author of Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (University of Massachusetts Press, l980).  Her recent research focuses on transnational women’s activism and filmmaking. With Jennifer Rycenga, she is the co-editor of Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance (Routledge, 2001), with Frank Burke Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Toronto Press, 2002), with Sylvia Marcos of Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (Palgrave 2005), and with Amalia Cabezas and Ellen Reese, The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policy, Repression, and Women’s Poverty (Paradigm Publishers 2007).

Todd Waller, M.Ed. is Associate Director for Student Life at the John Felice Rome Center of Loyola University Chicago and a doctoral candidate in international education at the University of London. He is the former Director of the Center for Democratic Studies and Constitutional Development at The Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center. He has taught service learning courses and coordinated international service projects at a number of universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Denver, Regis University, and Fordham University.  He has directed two documentary films in Bosnia Herzegovina.  His most recent publication is “Cultural Identity in the Balkans: perspectives on morality, identity and social justice” (2007), Borderlands Journal.

Anne Wingenter received her Ph.D. in History from Loyola University, Chicago in 2003. Her PhD thesis, a study of war mothers and widows in Fascist Italy, was awarded the Society of Italian Historical Studies’ dissertation prize for that year.  In Rome since completing her doctorate, she has taught courses in women’s history and contemporary Italian history for the study abroad programs of Loyola University and the University of California. Her research focuses primarily on gender and women's history; contemporary Europe; and the history of travel. Recent publications include “Voices of Sacrifice: Letters to Mussolini and Ordinary Writing Under Fascism” in Ordinary Writing, Personal Narratives. Peter Lang,  2007 and “Shades of Seduction: Gender and Satire in American Visions of Italy 1947-1948” in Est e Ovest nella Satira Politica durante la Guerra Fredda. l’Aracne Editrice, (forthcoming). Her current project looks at American travel in Italy during the immediate post-WWII period.