Thursday, November 13
For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. The lives of these Italian women are woven into the artifacts of memory and imagination: embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting. Embroidered Stories (University Press of Mississippi, 2014), edited by Edvige Giunta and Joseph Sciorra, is an interdisciplinary collection including academic essays and creative works from Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States.

The entire collection explores multiple interpretations of the relationships between needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective during the period of the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. A number of the book's contributors will participate in the presentation.

Organizing Institution: Calandra Italian American Institute