This panel invites papers examining Italian American engagements with Hollywood and Los Angeles as a central locus of literary production, cinematic labor, and cultural myth-making. Long understood as a global factory of images, Hollywood has also functioned as a crucial site where Italian American writers, filmmakers, performers, and cultural workers shaped—and were shaped by—the American and transnational imaginarium.

The panel foregrounds Los Angeles not simply as a backdrop, but as a dynamic cultural space in which Italian American identities, aesthetics, and mythologies were negotiated across media. From early studio-era casting practices and ethnic performance, to postwar literary production, screenwriting, and New Hollywood auteurism, Italian Americans have played an important role in constructing Hollywood’s narratives of power, identity, family, criminality, romance, and aspiration. These narratives, in turn, circulated globally, informing popular understandings of Italian and Italian American identity well beyond the United States. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches that place literature, film, media history, and cultural studies in dialogue. The panel welcomes work that reassesses canonical figures alongside understudied historical and contemporary figures, archival materials, and transnational circuits of influence. Contributions may also consider how Italian American Hollywood intersects with other ethnic, racial, and migratory formations, as well as how Hollywood’s Italian-inflected myths have been translated, contested, or reappropriated globally.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Italian American novelists and poets working in or writing about Hollywood and Los Angeles
• Screenwriting as ethnic labor: from studio-era writers to New Hollywood auteurs
• Italian American mythologies of crime, family, and masculinity in global circulation
• The “Latin Lover” and other ethnic performance tropes in classical Hollywood
• Other ethics playing Italians and the politics of ethnic substitution and erasure on screen
• Italian American stardom, biography, and celebrity culture
• Midwestern Italian American imaginaries and their influence on gangster cinema
• Italian Americans and New Hollywood (e.g., Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma)
• Italian authors writing in English and translation cultures connected to Hollywood
• Archival research in Los Angeles–based collections and studio archives

By situating Italian American cultural production within Hollywood’s industrial, symbolic, and global reach, the panel aims to rethink Hollywood itself as an ethnicized space—one in which Italian American participation was not marginal, but foundational to the making of American popular culture and its worldwide influence.

Submission guidelines:

Please submit a 250-300-word paper abstract along with five keywords and a 250-word bio to Anthony Dion Mitzel, anthonydion.mitzel@unibo.it, and Alan Hartman, ahartman@mercy.edu, by March 20, 2026. This is a guaranteed LLC Italian American Forum Session. Papers not accepted will be considered for a waitlist.