On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose

by Luisa Del Giudice

In these dynamic essays, thirteen wise women review their lives for meaning and purpose, striving to integrate both head and heart. They consider how their spiritual paradigms have shaped their vocations as teachers, scholars, guides, mentors, and advocates and how these roles have been integral to their life’s work, not merely to their work life. With courageous and insightful testimonies they narrate the intersecting relationships of work, family, students, patients, and colleagues, weaving them together rather than compartmentalizing them. Challenges inside and outside the academy and other professional settings are revealed, to tell of suffering and transformation, to tally hard-earned life lessons and to share wisdom achieved. 

Lives and words are gathered and generously shared, allowing these women to make sense of their own lives while mentoring a wider circle of younger and older readers alike. These “travel tales” of journeys through knowledge and self-knowledge will inform, challenge, surprise, entertain, and inspire. 

360 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2017

About the author

Founder and Executive Director, Dr. Luisa Del Giudice is an Independent Scholar. She was Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Folklore, UCLA (1995-2001); has published and lectured widely on Italian and Italian American folklife, from foodways and oral expression to material culture, children's literature, and belief; and has produced many public events on Italian and Mediterranean regional and folk culture in Los Angeles, California.

Among her monographs and recordings are: Cecilia: Testi e contesti di un canto narrativo tradizionale, Brescia: Grafo, 1995; Studies in Italian American Folklore (ed.), Logan: Utah State UP, 1993; Italian Traditional Song (recordings and book), Italian Heritage Culture Foundation and the Italian Cultural Institute, Los Angeles, 1989 (2nd rev. ed., 1995); Il canto narrativo al Brallo, Varzi: Guardamagna, 1989; Canto narrativo al Brallo (recording), Milan: Albatros, 1990; “Paesi di Cuccagna and other Gastronomic Utopias,” in Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia, and Longing in Oral Cultures (ed. by LDG and Gerald Porter), Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Forthcoming: "Neo-Tarantismo and Folk Revival in the Salento," Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean (ed. L. Del Giudice and Nancy Van Deusen). She is currently President of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (Commission pour l’étude de la chanson populaire), Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore (2000 - 2005) and a member of the SIEF Executive Board. She is committed to community education and to creating innovative public programs on the folk and regional cultures of Italians and Italian Americans.