It is with great sorrow that I write about the unexpected passing of our friend and colleague, Joseph Sciorra. Some of you may have already seen the notice that his wife, Zulma Ortiz-Fuentes, posted on Facebook.
Dr. Joseph Sciorra, a folklorist and cultural historian who was the director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College of the City University of New York for over a quarter-century, died on October 5 in Ridgewood. He was 71.
Joseph, a Brooklyn-born ethnographer with a fieldworker’s eye and an archivist’s discipline, reshaped the study of Italian American culture. He insisted that vernacular expression was not ephemera to be patronized, but rather a living archive of memory, devotion, and identity, worthy of serious scholarly attention. During his three-decade career, he rigorously and generously documented, interpreted, and championed Italian American cultural productions, leaving no corner of the field untouched: yard shrines, sidewalk altars, religious processions, presepi, decorated flowerpots, the music of accordion-lit nightclub dance floors, and more.
Joseph earned a BA in anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1980, an MA in performance studies from New York University in 1987, and a PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. His doctoral research on the Brooklyn Giglio feast shaped the focus of his career: studying how immigrant communities imbue urban landscapes with meaning through ritual, material culture, and performance.
Before joining the Calandra Institute in late 1999, he held positions at the Ethnic Folk Arts Center, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, City Lore, the National Audubon Society, and Art Reach New Jersey. His early career took him from presenting concerts of Italian folk musicians to surveying traditional craftspeople across New York’s boroughs, from the casitas of the Casita Rincón Criollo in the South Bronx to the memorial walls of the Lower East Side.
At the Calandra Institute, Joseph spearheaded the institution’s public and scholarly programming. He organized the Institute’s annual conference and conceptualized and implemented the following programs: the monthly “Writers Read” author series; the “Documented Italians” film and video series; and the Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies. Joseph curated or co-curated more than a dozen exhibitions, including ones on the Black Madonna, historic religious banners from Italian Williamsburg, Neapolitan sheet music, ex-votos, Italian American religious expression, and the art of Onorio Ruotolo and the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. He served as editor of the Italian American Review from 2009 to 2016 and as editorial director from 2017 to the present. Under his leadership, the peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal of social science and cultural studies became a publication of national and international standing.
Joseph’s scholarship was prodigious and wide-ranging. Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) is the culmination of decades of fieldwork. It received the Italian American Studies Association’s 2016 Nonfiction Book Award and remains the definitive study of Italian American Catholic material culture. R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art (Henry Holt, 1994; Thames and Hudson, 2002), created with photographer Martha Cooper, documented the spray-can memorials of New York City’s neighborhoods with a tenderness and respect that helped legitimize graffiti as a subject of serious inquiry. He edited Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives (Fordham University Press, 2011), a landmark anthology that reclaimed folk expressivity as a shaping force in Italian American life, and co-edited with Laura E. Ruberto the two-volume New Italian Migrations to the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2017), which surveyed the history, politics, culture, and arts of post-1945 Italian immigration. He also co-edited volumes that opened new avenues of inquiry in fields that had been neglected or dismissed. They include Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (with Edvige Giunta, 2014), Neapolitan Postcards: The Canzone Napoletana as Transnational Subject (with Goffredo Plastino, 2016), and Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema (with Giuliana Muscio, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 2010).
Joseph’s dozens of essays ranged across the cultural landscape. They covered Puerto Rican casitas and the architecture of the South Bronx, the Giglio feast of Williamsburg, the Black Madonna of East 13th Street, the decorated flowerpots of Brooklyn, Italian American doo-wop and rap, Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers, the murder of Yusef Hawkins and the anti-racism movement within the Italian American community, debates over the Columbus monument, the presepio as autoethnography and protest, and the history of the 1927 recordings of “Protesta per Sacco e Vanzetti.” His writing appeared in The New York Times, Journal of American Folklore, Buildings & Landscapes, Italian American Review, Altreitalie, Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, The Drama Review, Ethnologie française, and numerous edited anthologies. He was also a published poet and creative writer, with work in Voices in Italian Americana, the Paterson Literary Review, and The Inquisitive Eater.
His applied scholarship was equally consequential. He successfully nominated two examples of vernacular architecture to the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places: the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Grotto on Staten Island in 2000, and the Lisanti Family Chapel in the Bronx from 2001 to 2002. He led the social media campaign that resulted in the inclusion of the 1927 78rpm recordings of "Protesta per Sacco e Vanzetti" in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in 2019. He facilitated donations of works by self-taught artists Giovanni Indelicato and Vincenzo Ancona to the Fenimore Art Museum and the Museum of International Folk Art and of Rocco Castello’s zampogna to the New York Historical. He organized the annual September 8 gathering at The Phoenix, a gay bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to celebrate the Sicilian Black Madonna of Tindari. This tradition was revived from a former Italian American lay religious association and storefront chapel. He also led the campaign to install a headstone on the unmarked grave of Pietro “Pete” Panto (1910–1939), a dockworker and labor activist who was murdered. This act of restorative justice exemplified his conviction that scholarship and civic responsibility are inseparable.
Joseph was inducted into the Fellows of the American Folklore Society in 2016. In 2021, he received the Studs Terkel Award from the Working-Class Studies Association for his online essay "Protesta Per Sacco & Vanzetti," and in 2003, he received the Anne and Henry Paolucci Prize in Italian American Writing for his essay on the murder of Yusef Hawkins and the subsequent march on Bensonhurst. Joseph held a non-stipendiary research fellowship at the Bard Graduate Center in 2014 and was a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library from 2012 to 2013. His papers and fieldwork collections are housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, and the Special Collections at San Diego State University — a dispersed archive befitting a scholar whose interests ranged from Italian American folklore and Puerto Rican vernacular architecture to Italian hip-hop.
Joseph was a cultural broker and public intellectual in the truest sense: a man who presented his research in academic settings, church basements, and social clubs; a man who built bridges between academia and everyday life; a man who found the sacred in the everyday and considered the everyday worthy of the most careful study. He is survived by his wife and life partner, Zulma Ortiz-Fuentes, and their two children, Akela and Lucca.