After a brief hiatus, the Johns Hopkins Italian Club has been restored under a new management with a new vision for the direction of the club. Above all, the Italian Club is now seeking to take on a novel social dynamic which will make it more accessible to a larger proportion of Hopkins students.
Junior Herty Cortez, the new president of the Italian Club, enthusiastically explained that the club’s revival offered an excellent opportunity to expand its aims and functions. He contrasted this with the aims and functions it had possessed prior to being placed on hiatus.
“Before this year, the Italian Club had a very academic background and objective,” Cortez said. “The prime goal for the Italian Club was to provide tutoring because the school did not offer tutoring for Italian ... and to promote conversations between students that wanted to continue on with Italian after they finished their studies.”
Cortez added that the original Italian Club had attempted to branch out from its primary goals, but that a lack of participation hindered its efforts.
“They attempted to have more social events as they were going on, but their recruitment wasn’t as successful,” Cortez said.
Ultimately, the lack of participation caused the Italian Club to disappear once the last of its members graduated in the summer of 2013.
However, as sophomore Elsheba Abraham, new vice-president of the Italian Club, explained, the club’s hiatus proved short-lived. Through the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, Cortez began to contact people with the goal of restarting things as early as last semester.
“He sent out an email through all the TAs asking whoever was interested in the Italian Club to give a shout-out,” Abraham said.
After organizing an impromptu gelato event, the prospective members of the new Italian Club turned their attention toward the issue of leadership with the aim of re-establishing the club.
“We have open leadership roles for anyone who wants to join,” Abraham said. “That’s how I got involved in the club.”
These initial moves toward restarting the Italian Club were acknowledged and supported by the club’s former academic advisor, Troy Tower, who contacted Cortez with a proposal to formally re-establish the club.
In his new leadership position, Cortez clearly set out his new vision for the Italian Club.
“I wanted to separate the academic and social elements of the club,” Cortez said.
Cortez began by elaborating how the academic aspects of the Italian Club were initially addressed.
“The first thing that I thought would be great would be to email all the students and survey all the students who are currently in Italian to see if they needed the tutoring,” Cortez said. “Once I got statistical proof that students really needed the tutoring, then we were able to ask the school to provide tutoring for Italian. Now Learning Den has a specific tutor for Italian.”
However, Cortez went on to express that academic aspects of the Italian Club were taken care of primarily to make room for the more novel aspects of the club’s new direction.
“I wanted to separate that immediately as I felt like we needed to be more of a social club,” Cortez said. “You don’t see these culture clubs as open; you don’t hear about them as often.”
Cortez also outlined the details of the Italian Club’s affiliation with Hopkins.
“Technically we’re a club like anyone else, so we need SGA [Student Government Association] approval,” Cortez said. “So technically we can get funding from the SGA, but from the Department [of German and Romance Languages and Literatures] as well if we work along with the department.”
However, the Italian Club’s primary source of funding remains the SGA. The department, on the other hand, serves a variety of other practical purposes.
“The department tries to bring in speakers from Italy, famous writers and so on,” Cortez said. “Sometimes we try to correlate along with them so that we can benefit from them.”
The benefits of department affiliation have their limits though. Cortez regretted that publicity carried out by the department for events would naturally fail to reach the wider student population.
“They try to advertise it, but since they’re mainly professors trying to advertise it, they don’t get to the student body,” Cortez said.
Generally speaking however, the department has played an important and valuable role in reviving the Italian Club.
“The department is very helpful. Along with coordinating events with us, the professors are very willing to come in and speak to the students as well,” Cortez said.
Logistical and publicity support, rather than funding, is currently the Italian Club’s main concern. “Right now, our prime objective is to try to get our word out as much as possible,” Cortez said. “The financial situation will get sorted out afterwards.”
The Italian Club’s focus on raising awareness speaks to the challenges they anticipate in trying to reactivate the club and host events ranging from high-table talks to soccer screenings.
“Definitely involvement is our main concern,” Abraham said. “We do get people who sign up, but people who actually go to the events, we’re still trying to see how that’s going to work out.”
One of the means by which the Italian Club hopes to bring in Italian-speaking students is through “high-table talks,” which would give students the opportunity to keep practicing the language.
“What we hope to have out of high-table talks is to basically have a meal, and students around it, discussing some sort of topic,” Cortez said.
Cortez stressed, however, that the Italian Club will also cater to non-Italian speakers who simply have an interest in the country but lacked an opportunity to study it through an academic course.
“We really want to involve as much of the campus and Hopkins community as much as possible,” Cortez said. “We definitely welcome everyone.”
