03/21/2018
A beautiful tribute to JoAnn posted by M.E.L.U.S. today:
https://www.facebook.com/StacyBierlein/posts/10215450946084105
Dear MELUS members (with apologies for any duplication),
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of a member of our community. JoAnne Ruvoli, Ph.D., was an active member and tremendous supporter of MELUS for many years, and will be greatly missed. She served as the Graduate Representative on the Executive Council and helped to create the first MELUS website.
JoAnne published articles on D.W. Griffith, Women Screenwriters of Early Cinema, Mario Puzo, Carole Maso, Jane Addams’ Hull-House, and others. Her scholarship was innovative, sharp, and insightful, and her presentations at MELUS conferences were always well received. She presented many times on silent film, pedagogy, Italian American literature, archival work, and graphic novels. In 2008, she co-edited a special issue of Voices in Italian Americana, “Reconsidering Mario Puzo.”
Her most recent work can be seen in the current issue of the MELUS journal, “Metaphors, Mamma, and Meatballs: Personal Storytelling in the Criticism of Italian American Literature.” JoAnne was also actively involved in the Italian American Studies Association and served as the Film and Digital Media Review Editor for the Calandra Institute's Italian American Review. She was happiest when surrounded by books and manuscripts.
JoAnne began her career as a high school teacher in Los Angeles through the Teach For America program. She would tell the students that they had to go out of their way to find their family’s stories if they weren’t reading them in school and helped them bring many multiethnic writers into the classroom. Los Angeles is also where she developed her interest in film studies, because, as she described it, “I was not paid very well and was always broke, but there was a film theater in my neighborhood that screened early silent films on a regular basis for very little money.” Eventually, she responded to her students’ questions about her own family’s stories by returning to graduate school to study Italian American literature.
JoAnne received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian at the University of California, Los Angeles. At the time of her death, Jo Anne was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.
She was humble and self-effacing but stealthily brilliant and creative--a mentor to many, a generous reader and collaborator, a dedicated scholar, and a dear friend to many in our organization.
JoAnne's family will host a memorial for her in Chicago on April 14, 2018, and the officers of MELUS are planning ways to pay tribute to her at our upcoming conference in May.
Sincerely,
The Members of the MELUS Executive Committee
Picture from MELUS 2014 at Oklahoma City University.
Pictured, from the left: Anastasia Lin, Univ. of North Georgia; MaryAnne Lyons, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; JoAnne Ruvoli, Ball State Univ.; Cristina Stanciu, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; J.J. Butts, Simpson College; and J. Steve Pearson, Univ. of North Georgia.
