I was born on the lower East side of Manhattan and grew up there and in Queens, New York. I received my B.A. from Queens College (CUNY), New York’s public university. My M.A. and Ph. D. degrees are from Columbia University, where I studied under Shepard Clough, A. William Salomone, Peter Gay, Garrett Mattingly, and Eric Goldman. As a graduate student I was awarded two Fulbright grants to Milan, Italy to do research on my dissertation, which later became my first book, and as a professor I won a Fulbright fellowship to Rome to research my second book. I started teaching at the University of Kentucky and came to UMass Boston in 1970. I have been a full professor since 1986 and in 1997 the university named me research professor.

My teaching and writing has centered on the history of Italy and Europe. My specialty is modern Italian Socialism, from which I branched out to the general history of Italy and modern Europe, to political thought, and to Italian-American subjects. I have taught a gamut of courses from Western Civilization to Italian and European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to graduate courses on a variety of specialized topics. I introduced online courses to the history department, teach regularly online, and won the 2007 University Continuing Education Association’s Award for Excellence in Teaching; in 2006 I won the same association’s regional award for innovation in teaching.