Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder (calabret@uark.edu) is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arkansas and received his Ph. D. from Middlebury College in Italian and French. His research revolves around contemporary Italian and Italian American literature and cinema, particularly from a diasporic perspective. He is the author of Divergenze in celluloide: Colore, migrazione e identità nei film gay di Ferzan Özpetek (2016), editor of Pasolini’s Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros, and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini (2018), and co-editor of Theorizing the Italian Diaspora (2018), Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future (2020), Italian Americans on the Page (in progress) and The ‘Italian Americans’ of the South and Southwest: Historical, Literary, and Filmic Representations (in progress). His articles have appeared in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Italica, Italian Americana, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and is the founding editor of Diasporic Italy: The Journal of the Italian American Studies Association (University of Illinois Press). He received the Fulbright College Master Teacher Award in 2023 and one of four Fulbright Foundation for the South Award (2017) to teach Italian American literature at the University of Calabria. He is currently Director of Communication for the American Association of Teachers of Italian and president of Gamma Kappa Alpha.
Dr. Kathleen Condray (condray@uark.edu) is Professor of German at the University of Arkansas and received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her book Das Arkansas Echo: A Year in the Life of Nineteenth-Century Germans in the South was published by the University of Arkansas press in 2020 and was the recipient of the Booker Worthen Literary Prize (awarded each year to the best work, fiction or non-fiction, by an author living in Arkansas) by the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) Board of Trustees in 2021. She received two Fulbright grants: in 2014 as senior lecturer at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau and 2002 for the Fulbright German Studies Seminar, “International Migration and National Identities” in Berlin, Leipzig, and Cologne as well as an NEH summer institute grant in 2005 to attend “German and European Studies in the U.S.—Changing World, Shifting Narratives” at the University of Massachusetts. In 2017, she was the recipient of the American Association of Teachers of German Checkpoint Charlie Foundation Teacher Award, a national award conferred to one post-secondary instructor per year and sponsored by the foundation.
Dr. Linda Jones (lcjones@uark.edu) is Professor of Language Area Studies at the University of Arkansas and received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. Her book, The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2020, and she has authored two journal articles, two book reviews, and one encyclopedia article all focused on French and Native American encounters in Arkansas and/or the North American continent. She was the recipient of an NEH grant (1997-2001) in collaboration with Dr. George Sabo (Arkansas Archeological Survey) and Dr. Luis Restrepo (Professor of Spanish, University of Arkansas) that culminated in a CD published in 2000 entitled First Encounters: Native American and Europeans in the Mississippi Valley. She more recently received an Arkansas Humanities grant in collaboration with Mullins Library’s Special Collections Center at the University of Arkansas to digitize family records from early Arkansas Post (2012-2015). This project entitled Colonial Arkansas Post Ancestry culminated in an online search tool for documents relevant to French Arkansas habitants during the early to mid-18th century. Dr. Jones actively teaches courses on French Colonial Mississippi History, Native American and French language encounters, and language teaching and video and web-based technologies.