Arcadia University

Adjunct Professor (ITESM), Humanities

Lecturer, Urban Studies Program

University of Pennsylvania

About

Joan Saverino is currently an adjunct professor at Arcadia University in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice and a lecturer in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked for 30 years in education, museums, and as a private consultant. Most recently, she was the Director of Education and Outreach at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania where she was the creator and founding director of PhilaPlace (www.philaplace.org), a collaborative neighborhood history and culture Web-based project, that received over $500,000 in federal, state, and private funding. It won honorable mention in the exhibitions category at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference. Saverino has a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Folklore and Folklife and a masters in anthropology with a specialization in museology from The George Washington University. She is a graduate of West Virginia University with a major in anthropology and sociology. She has also taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in immigration and ethnicity, gender and culture, folklore, and material culture at the University of Pennsylvania. Saverino’s research interests include immigration and ethnicity, gender and culture, material culture and dress, space and place, heritage tourism, and digital humanities. Her own research focuses on Italian and Italian American ethnicity and culture and she has conducted research in Calabria, Italy, and in the United States. She is currently working on a multi-sited transnational project that uses the lens of needlework and dress to investigate embodied social relations of Calabrian and immigrant women to West Virginia during the early decades of the twentieth century. Her work on Italian Americans has appeared in both popular and academic publications, including Global Philadelphia (Temple University Press), Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives (Fordham University Press), and Embroidered Lines and Cut Threads: Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (forthcoming University of Mississippi Press).