JoAnne Ruvoli was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian at the University of California, Los Angeles. She held a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she specialized in multi-ethnic American literature and also earned an Interdepartmental Concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her book project Framing Ethnicity: Storytelling in Italian American Novels, examined how narrative frames and representations of oral storytelling mediate ethnic memory and rhetorically shape transnational relationships in the novels. She published articles on D.W. Griffith, Women Screenwriters of Early Cinema, Mario Puzo, Carole Maso, and Jane Addams’ Hull-House. She also co-edited a 2008 special issue of Voices in Italian Americana that focuses on “Reconsidering Mario Puzo,” and previous to that project, for four years, was Assistant Editor at the now-defunct fiction journal Other Voices. In 2007, she won the Frederick Stern Award for Excellence in Teaching at University of Illinois at Chicago where she taught American literature courses in multi-ethnic literature, gender in literature, and writing.