Not surprisingly, Professor Gardaphe and his students share a laugh in his course “Funniest Fiction.”
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Fred L. Gardaphe grew up in Melrose Park, a gritty Italian-American suburb of Chicago. He entered academe as a refuge from the violence that took the lives of three of the most important men in his life. His grandfather was killed during a hold-up of his pawnshop. His godfather was shot as he tried to hold up a local golf course. Organized crime allegedly had a hand in his father’s unsolved murder.<\/p>\nBut Gardaphe never turned his back on these family tragedies. Instead, he examined them with a scholar\u2019s eye and went on to play a central role in the establishment and growth of Italian American studies in recent years. Programs now exist at about a dozen institutions in the United States, including QC.<\/p>\n
Italian immigrants have left an indelible mark on American culture\u2014from their cuisine to the stereotyped Italian gangster that fascinates American moviegoers. Yet little attention has been paid to the experiences of immigrants and their American-born children.<\/p>\n
It is a gap Gardaphe has helped fill with a prolific stream of writing, including From Wiseguys to Wise Men: Masculinities and the Italian American Gangster<\/i> (2006). He is currently working on a book about the role of humor in Italian American communities, including what he sees as a notable lack of irony among second-generation Italian Americans. \u201cEverything you can laugh about in Jewish culture,\u201d he says, \u201cyou get into a fight about in Italian-American culture.\u201d Gardaphe is also revisiting the killings of his male relatives in a memoir, Living with the Dead<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Gardaphe was recruited to Queens in the beginning of 2008 after a decade spent building up an Italian-American studies program at SUNY, Stony Brook. Queens\u2019s student body is ethnically very mixed, and many students work full or part time. Maybe that\u2019s why QC feels \u201cmore connected to the rest of the world,\u201d says Gardaphe. Students here seem \u201ca lot more willing to learn new things\u201d than young people at other institutions.<\/p>\n
Favorite books:<\/strong><\/i> Walt Whitman,\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/i>: While countless young people have been inspired to roam by Jack Kerouac\u2019s \u00a0On the Road<\/i>, it was Whitman\u2019s poem, \u201cSong of the Open Road\u201d (in Leaves of Grass<\/i>) that set Gardaphe off, at age 20, on a hitchhiking trip across the United States. He also loves Innocents Abroad<\/i> by Mark Twain which, with its witty use of irony, says Gardaphe, opened for him \u201ca whole new level of communication.\u201d<\/p>\nFavorite musician:<\/strong> <\/i>Van Morrison, \u201cthe Frank Sinatra of my generation.\u201d<\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Name: Fred GardapheTitle:Distinguised Professor of Italian American StudiesDepartment: EnglishDegree(s): PhD, University of Illinois at ChicagoContact Information: Phone: (718) 997-4655 Office: Klapper 535 Email:\u00a0 Fred.Gardaphe@qc.cuny.edu “QC feels more connected to the rest of the world.”- Fred Gardaphe Student Profiles Alumni Profiles Faculty Profiles Staff ProfilesNot surprisingly, Professor Gardaphe and his students share a laugh in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"page_category":[],"wf_page_folders":[137],"class_list":["post-1135","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1840,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1135\/revisions\/1840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"page_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/page_category?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"wf_page_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_page_folders?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}