Professor Anthony Julian Tamburri

Anthony Julian Tamburri is Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY) and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures. He is co-founder of Bordighera Press and a former president of both the Italian American Studies Association and the American Association of Teachers of Italian. A scholar of semiotics, Italian literature and cinema, diaspora studies, and interpretation theory, he has authored 23 books and over 140 academic essays in English and Italian. His recent work focuses on Italian/American identity and contemporary cultural politics, including A Politics of [Self-]Omission (2022/2025) and Expanding Diasporic Identity (2025). His work is widely engaged in North American and transatlantic Italian studies, with strong relevance to Canadian multicultural and diaspora scholarship, particularly in how Italian identity is reshaped across North American contexts. He also hosts the Calandra Institute’s TV program Italics and directs two academic book series in English and Italian.

Activist and Rapper Amir Issaa

Amir Issaa is a rapper, author, and educator using hip hop to explore language, identity, and storytelling. Born in Rome’s Tor Pignattara to an Egyptian father and Italian mother, he entered hip hop in the early 1990s as a breaker and graffiti writer, later turning to rap, an essential outlet during a childhood marked by his father’s incarceration. A founder of Rome Zoo, he has built a twenty-year discography. His debut Uomo di prestigio (2006, EMI Virgin / Prestigio Records) was among the first Italian rap albums to address second generations, identity, and citizenship, helping bring these themes into public and academic debate. A pioneer of rap in education, he works with schools and institutions (Treccani, Rizzoli Education, Feltrinelli, Save the Children, UNICEF, Emergency) and founded Potere alle Parole with UNAR and Il Razzismo è una brutta storia. He contributed to the soundtrack of Scialla! (2011, dir. Francesco Bruni) and authored Vivo per Questo (2017), Educazione Rap (2021), and Rap in classe (2025, BELMA winner). He has lectured at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgetown, NYU, and Dartmouth, and internationally. His latest album, La prossima volta il fuoco / The Fire Next Time (2025, Hasib Records), continues his focus on identity and empowerment.