Congratulations, Ernest Ialongo!
Professor Ialongo is a member of the Social Sciences unit in the Behavioral and Social Sciences Department. He is the coChair of the College Senate and the coChair of the Honors Program. He has several publications and numerous conference presentations and most recently was awarded with a Chancellor’s Research Fellowship. About his project, he wrote:
The title of my project is “Nation-Building through Antisemitism: Politics and Culture in the Persecution of Italian Jews, 1936-1945.” This is an investigation into the nature of Italian national identity, wherein I posit that fears of a weak national identity have led to a pattern of identifying and persecuting internal enemies, the Italian Jews being the most pronounced example, in order to address this issue.
Congratulations, Marcella Bencivenni!
Professor Bencivenni is a member of the Social Sciences unit in the Behavioral and Social Sciences Department. She has authored numerous publications and presented nationally and internationally. She currently is working as a Lead Faculty Research Mentor with the Title V grant and has recently been awarded with a Chancellor’s Research Fellowship Award. Her project is titled: “Carl Marzani: A Radical American Life.” About this project, she wrote:
The Chancellor Research Award will allow me to continue working on a project I began last year with the support of a PSC-CUNY research grant on Carl Marzani (1912-1994), an Italian American antifascist who during WWII was employed by the U.S. government in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) and was consequently sentenced to three years in jail for hiding his past communist affiliations. Enveloped in an atmosphere of growing anticommunist hysteria, his political case attracted enormous attention at the time, becoming highly symbolic of the ideological battle of the Cold War. As I dug deeper into the case and the existing archives, however, it became apparent to me that there are other aspects and questions to Marzani’s life and legacy that have been completely overlooked by his case and that deserve more attention. Expanding and, in some ways, re-conceptualizing my initial project, I intend to write a full-length biography of Carl Marzani.
