About > Faculty > Simone Cinotto

Simone Cinotto

• Researcher in Contemporary History

Biography

Simone Cinotto holds a Ph.D. in American History (University of Genoa, 2001), a strong record of research, teaching, and publication in the United States, and significant teaching and administrative experience with U.S. and other international (Asian, European, African, and Latin American) students in Italy.

Cinotto teaches U.S., Italian, and Food History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy, where he is the Academic Director of the Master’s Program in “Food Culture and Communications.” He has also taught Italian American Studies at New York University in the summer.

He has been Visiting Professor of Italian American Studies at the Department of Italian Studies at New York University (2008), Visiting Scholar of the History Department at Columbia University (2007, 2000, 1998), Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2004), Visiting Fellow of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University (2000), and Resident Fellow of The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies-Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (2009, 2000, 1998). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Quaderni Storici, The Italian American Review, and the “Critical Studies in Italian America” series at Fordham University Press.

Cinotto is the author of A Family That Eats Together: Food in the Making of Italian American New York, in translation for University of Illinois Press (Forthcoming 2013) and Soft Soil Black Grapes: Race, Labor, and the Birth of Italian Winemaking in California, in translation for New York University Press (Forthcoming 2012). He is the guest editor of a special issue of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana on “Consumer Culture and Italian American History” (Spring 2010), which he is now transforming into a volume for Fordham University Press (All Things Italian: Consumer Culture in Italian American History, Forthcoming 2013). His most recent article has appeared on The Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

His article “Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the Eating Habits of Italian Immigrants in New York,” won the 2004 David Thelen Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best article on American history published in a language other than English, and was published in The Journal of American History. He has recently submitted articles to The Journal of American History and The Journal of Social History, and is working on an article for American Quarterly.

Cinotto has participated to a number of international research teams and to the organization of international conferences on transatlantic and transnational history, in cooperation, among others, with Columbia University in the City of New York. In Italy, he has been the coordinator of public history projects on Italian migrations, the social history of rice, and the production, consumption, and culturalization of specialty food products.

Courses Taught

World History of Food since 1492

Food, Immigration, and Race in American History (History of Food in the United States)

History of Italian Cuisine and the Mediterranean Diet

Food, Identity, and Place

Major Areas of Research

U.S. Immigration History.

Food History.

Italian and Italian American History.

History of Consumer Society.

Key Publications

Terra soffice uva nera: viticoltori piemontesi in California prima e dopo il Proibizionismo (Turin: Otto, 2008), forthcoming English edition, Soft Soil, Black Grapes: Race, Labor, and the Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

Una famiglia che mangia insieme: Cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920-1940 (Turin: Otto, 2001), forthcoming English edition, A Family That Eats Together: Food in the Making of Italian New York (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

Special issue on “Italian American History and Consumer Culture,” Voices in Italian Americana 21, no. 1 (2010), guest editor.

“Memories of the Italian Rice Belt, 1945-65: Work, Class Conflict and Intimacy during the Great Transformation,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16, no. 4 (2011): 531-552.

“Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the Eating Habits of Italian Immigrants in New York,” Journal of American History 91, no. 2 (2004): 497-521.

Contacts

Simone Cinotto
University of Gastronomic Sciences | Pollenzo Campus
Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, 9
fraz. Pollenzo - 12042 Bra (Cn)

Phone: +39 0172 458511
Fax: +39 0172 458500
Email: s.cinotto@unisg.it