AISCLI WEBINAR SERIES 2023. Italian Diasporas and Indigenous Nations in Canada. With PAOLO FRASCA’ and ANGELA NARDOZI

Biographies

Professor Paolo Frascà is a faculty member in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. His work focuses on three main areas: pedagogy, particularly the teaching of Italian language and culture through a sociocultural approach and through collaborative, experiential methodologies; migration studies, with a focus on the Italian-Canadian community and its histories, languages, practices, and cultural production; sexuality and gender studies, specifically Queer theories and the Italian gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Before joining the University of Toronto’s Department of Italian Studies as a faculty member, he taught courses in language, culture, translation, literature, migration, and sexuality at the University of Toronto Mississauga and at Brock University. Prof. Frascà has published several peer-reviewed essays, in recognized scholarly journals and volumes, in areas that span from sociolinguistics and dialectology to the intersection between migration and queerness. He is Co-Director of two projects at the University of Toronto’s Frank Iacobucci Centre for Italian-Canadian Studies: Indigenous-Italian-Canadian Connections (with Dr. Angela Nardozi, University of Toronto) and Queer Italian-Canadian Artists (with Dr. Licia Canton, Accenti Magazine). Prof. Frascà also oversees a number of experiential and cultural activities in his role of Language Coordinator. Additional roles at the University of Toronto include Steering Committee Member and Affiliated Faculty at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies and Co-Lead of the Global Languages Initiative. He is a contributor and member of various local and international organizations, including the Endangered Language Alliance of Toronto and the Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Queer. Prof. Frascà strives to integrate discussions on social justice, equity, and decolonization into his courses and considers himself a community-oriented educator and researcher.

Angela Nardozi is a guest on Turtle Island, with both sides of her family originating in Italy. She is a Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Co-Director of Indigenous-Italian-Canadian Connections, and a consultant and coach in private practice. She is a certified teacher and received her Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 2016 where she studied strategies to increase the willingness and the readiness of teacher candidates to incorporate Indigenous Education into their curriculum. After she completed her degree, she turned her attention from academic publishing to disseminating her findings and working directly with educators. Angela consults with and delivers workshops to educators across the Greater Toronto Area and has delivered hundreds of workshops to students from kindergarten to graduate level. She is an engaging speaker and has almost a decade of experience communicating to a vast array of audiences about Indigenous/Canadian issues and research. Her current work spans the corporate, non-profit, and educational sectors. She has been invited to speak to community and religious groups and has extensive experience with academic audiences as a keynote, invited and peer-reviewed speaker.   She is the author of Listen & Learn, a monthly newsletter for educators interested in teaching issues and resources related to Indigenous topics and from 2018 to 2021 co-produced the Kikinoo’amaadawin Webinar series with Dr. Jean-Paul Restoule, current chair of Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria. Her passion for working alongside Indigenous communities began in 2008, after living and working in a Treaty Three First Nation. After completing her MA research on the postsecondary aspirations of you within that community, she returned to Toronto to work with her own community – non-Indigenous educators. From 2011 to 2016 she was the Project Manager of the Deepening Knowledge Project, where she delivered workshops to over 6000 teacher candidates about Indigenous histories and current communities, and the responsibilities of Settler educators in teaching this content.

Anna Mongibello, PhD, is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy), and currently Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto (Canada). Her research interests include digital activisms, New Media Discourse, Digital Discourse and Social Media Discourse analyzed from a multimodal and discursive perspective; the intersections of language, ideology and power explored through corpus-based critical discourse analysis. She is a member of the Board of the Italian Association for Canadian Studies. In 2012 she was awarded the Doctoral Student Research Award issued by the Government of Canada and the International Council for Canadian Studies. She has published two books and numerous articles in national and international journals. In 2022, she co-edited with Bronwyn Carlson Macquarie (University) a special issue of Anglistica on Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: The Politics of Language, Media and Culture.