Honors for local scholar

Rockville Centre resident Stan Pugliese, a professor of modern European history and a Cultural Center fellow at Hofstra University, is one of nine individuals set to receive the school's Lifetime Service Recognition Award at the annual Alumni Awards Dinner on Oct. 9 at the Garden City Hotel.

A 1987 graduate of Hofstra, Pugliese is a former research fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the University of Oxford.

Pugliese is a specialist on the Italian anti-fascist Resistance and Italian Jews, and is the author, editor or translator of a dozen books on Italian and Italian-American history.

His first book, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Harvard University Press, 1999) has been translated into Italian, Russian and Romanian. He is currently editing a volume of essays titled "Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall," and collaborating on a film documentary on the Jews of Rome under the Nazi occupation. In 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his newest biography, "Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone."

Professor Pugliese is also the editor of "Italian Fascism and Antifascism: A Critical Anthology," as well as "The Most Ancient of Minorities: The Jews of Italy."

His essays on Italian and Italian-American history and culture regularly appear in academic and popular journals. He is the translator of Andrea Bocelli’s autobiography, The Music of Silence: A Memoir, and editor of the Italian and Italian-American Studies series published by Palgrave Macmillan.

At Hofstra University, Professor Pugliese directs the Italian-American Lecture Series, and has organized several international conferences, and edited the volume Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture. His essay, “The Books of the Roman Ghetto Under the Nazi Occupation” was presented at the Hofstra 17th Annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 1999, was awarded the Peter E. Herman Literary Award at Hofstra University, and has been translated into Italian.

A frequent book reviewer, Pugliese is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review. His most recent books are "Desperate Inscriptions: Graffiti From the Nazi Prison in Rome, 1943-1944;" and an anthology, "Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy". A volume of collected essays, "The Legacy of Primo Levi," appeared in 2005. Columbia University Press published a new edition of "Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom" in 2008.