How Changing Social Connections Shaped Philadelphia's Italian Legacy and Food

The Department of Transnational Italian Studies is delighted to announce “How Changing Social Connections Shaped Philadelphia's Italian Legacy and Food”, a lecture by , Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Temple University and former President of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. The event is organized within Luca Zipoli's course "Philadelphia the Global City: The Italian Legacy across Time" (ITAL B240) and is open to everyone.

Please contact lzipoli@brynmawr.edu for more information.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Growth and Structure of Cities, Praxis, and the Tri-Co Philly Program. 

Abstract:

The Italian legacy in Philadelphia was shaped by the social relationships between Italian and American people (elites and ordinary citizens), institutions (official and grassroots) at distinct moments of political and economic change. Using many examples, the talk will trace different routes through which visual, musical, and other cultural forms travelled, the agents (elites, workers, institutions) who brought them and how the changing city context made them valued as important to the city. It will end with a focus on how Italian food, once seen as unhealthy, became so important in the post-1970s global era.  

Speaker's bio: 

 is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Temple University and former President of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. She has served as Chair of the Anthropology Department and Director of the Urban Studies program. She has published many books, including The Anthropology of the City. An Introduction to Urban Anthropology (Prentice-Hall 1977, with Edwin Eames), Reshaping Ethnic and Racial Relations in Philadelphia: Immigrants in a Divided City (Temple University Press 1994, with Jo Ann Schneider). She also co-edited The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States (NYU Press 2002, with Jeff Maskovsky) and  (Temple University Press 2021, with Andrea Canepari). These volumes and many journal articles, book chapters, and reviews in academic publications are based on forty years of grant-funded research in Philadelphia about race, immigration, class, and neighborhoods. For the public, she has been a regular contributor of op-ed pieces, radio and TV interviews, and public lectures for local, national, and international audiences. In 2000 she received the Prize for Achievement in the Critical Study of North America from the Society for the Anthropology of North America for her lifetime of work.