Prof. Teresa Fiore, Inserra Chair, Presents Her Book at Italian Literary Festival in Boston (Nov. 2019)

Dr. Fiore, Professor of Italian and Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, was invited to present her award-winning book Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies (Fordham UP 2017), as part of a conversation titled “The Space Between: Analyzing Modern and Past Italian Immigration/Emigration” at IDEA Festival in Boston on Nov. 2, 2019. The event aimed at presenting contemporary immigration in Italy as a phenomenon profoundly linked to both emigration and colonialism, in order to identify mechanisms of race and ethnic formations along a historical continuum and denounce forms of oppression and exclusion in the name of the equal right to human mobility for former colonized populations.

The book was placed in dialogue with a recent publication by Dr. Stephanie Malia Hom titled Empire’s Moebius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell UP, 2019), which covers similar topics but from a historical and anthropological perspective compared to the sociological and cultural approach of Pre-Occupied Spaces. The conversation was moderated interview-style by veteran print and broadcast journalist Ken Shulman, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, the BBC, and PBS. See bios here.

IDEA Boston is an annual Italian-inspired festival, celebrating literature, history, art and many other aspects of Italian and Italian-American culture. The two-day event is organized by I AM Books, an independent bookstore in Boston’s North End neighborhood, in collaboration with several local organizations. See 2019 edition.

Over two years into its publication, Fiore’s book is still the subject of dynamic exchanges with scholars from different backgrounds as well as of invited lectures at private and public universities, along with presentations at community libraries and cultural centers. For more information about the book, see Pre-Occupied Spaces: Prizes, Reviews and Presentations.