Italian Studies

Professor Perry’s  scholarly interests focus upon Italy in World War II, contemporary Italian folklore, Italy in the Cold War, and Italian popular culture and literature. He has published numerous articles and an anthology (Il santo partigiano martire: La retorica del sacrificio nelle biografie commemorative with Longo Editore of Ravenna, 2001) on the ways Italians commemorate and remember WWII. He has also focused extensively on the journalist Giovannino Guareschi, himself held as a prisoner by the Nazis in Poland during the war. In 2008, the University of Tornoto Press published Prof. Perry’s The Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred. Recently he has studied the Italian POW experience in Pennsylvania and with Flavio G. Conti is the co-author of Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania: Allies on the Home Front, 1944 – 1945 (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016). Currently he and Conti have a contract with Arcadia Publishing to present a pictorial history of these POWs who were detained at the Letterkenny Army Ordnance Depot near Chambersburg.