Clarissa Clo (San Diego State University) and pasquale verdicchio (UC san diego), for the project San Diego’s Mid-Century Italian American Pulp Fiction.

Clarissa Clò is Professor of Italian, Chair of the Department of Comparative International Studies, and Alumni Association Distinguished Professor at San Diego State University. Her research includes migration and postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, Italian and Italian American Studies. Her work has appeared in numerous journals: Ácoma, Annali d’Italianistica, California Italian Studies, Diaspora, Forum Italicum, Italian American Review, Italian
Culture, Italica, JICMS, and Research in African Literatures. She has contributed to many book collections: The Cultures of Italian Migration, Postcolonial Italy, Italian Political Cinema, Encounters with the Real, Cinema of Exploration, Contemporary Italian Diversity, and Spaghetti Sissies. She edited special issues for Studies in Documentary Film and Il lettore di provincia. She is the editor and co-translator of Amir Issaa’s This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian
Hip-Hop Memoir, which received the Premio Internazionale Flaiano di Italianistica “Luca Attanasio” and the MLA Lois Roth Award for Outstanding Translation.

Pasquale Verdicchio (PhD, UCLA) is Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative Literature at UC-San Diego. A prolific scholar, translator and poet, he has written on national identity, migrations issues, Italian diaspora as well as visual arts. He has published several books of criticism, including Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through the Italian Diaspora (1997), as well translations of Gramsci, Alda Merini, Pasolini, Caproni, Zanzotto and many others. His most recent books of poetry are This Nothing’s Place (2008), Only You (2021), and Contentment (2024).