Simone Cinotto

Simone Cinotto is Professor of Modern History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, where he is the Director of the master’s program in World Food Studies and Reference Professor for Fulbright cultural exchange programs between Italy and the United States.

Cinotto is the author of several books, including Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935-1941 (Bloomsbury, 2024), The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Soft Soil Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (New York University Press, 2012).

He is the editor of as many volumes: Un oceano di stile: Produzione e consumo di Made in Italy negli Stati Uniti del dopoguerra (Mimesis, 2023), Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines (University of Toronto Press, 2023), Global Jewish Foodways: A History (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), and Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (Fordham University Press, 2014), which won the John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.

His article “Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the Eating Habits of Italian Immigrants in New York” won the 2004 David Thelen Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best article on American History published in a language other than English, and was published in the Journal of American History. In 2024, he was the editor of two journal special issues , “Transatlantic Modern Consumerisms: Italian Goods and Commercial Cultures in Postwar America” for the Italian American Review and “Transatlantic Literary Transfers in the Second Italian Renaissance: The Circulation of Italian Culture in the U.S.A. in the Postwar Era” for the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

Cinotto has been Visiting Professor/Visiting Scholar at Indiana University, New York University, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, University of Warsaw, University of London SOAS, Cornell University, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Cinotto is on the Editorial Board of several journals, among which Gastronomica, Food, Culture, and Society, Global Food History, and the Italian American Review.

Cinotto’s current research interests include the global history of food, migration and mobility and the history of transatlantic consumer cultures in the twentieth century. He has a book in preparation: Birth of a Cultural Superpower: Italian Products and Cultures in Postwar United States and the Transatlantic Origins of Made in Italy (Mimesis, 2024), and the textbooks Storia dell’alimentazione: Culture del cibo nel mondo moderno (Mondadori, 2024) and Food History: Cultures of Food in the Modern World (Routledge, 2025).

Reference Professor for Fulbright cultural exchange programs between Italy and the United States

Coordinator of the Master Program in World Food Studies

Member of the Ethic Committee

Coordinator of the Foundation Year program

Delegate for Internationalization and Alumni