Joseph Pivato

Joseph Pivato (born February 1946, in Tezze sul Brenta, Italy) is a Canadian writer and academic who first established the critical recognition of Italian-Canadian literature and changed perceptions of Canadian writing.

The family emigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1952 where the Catholic nuns changed his name to Joseph.

He attended St. Michael's College School, an academic high school for boys, where he studied languages and literature.

He enrolled at York University where he studied with modernist scholar, D.E.S. Maxwell, feminist and medievalist, Beryl Rowland, feminist scholar, Johanna H. Stuckey, Canadian writer, Irving Layton, met French poet Hedi Bouraoui and poet-critic, Eli Mandel.

In 1968 he founded and edited the first literary magazine at York, Voodoo Poetry at Vanier College.

With D.E.S. Maxwell he enrolled in the first course in African Literature (1969).

In the summers he worked with Italian bricklayers to help pay for his university fees.

In 1970 he earned a B.A. (Combined Honours, English and French) from York and moved to Edmonton to study Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta.

His 1971 M.A. thesis was on Dante and Baudelaire.

Writer and academic E.D. Blodgett was his advisor for his Ph.D. thesis on hermetic poetry.

He also met Canadian writers Henry Kreisel and Sheila Watson and began to work on Canadian authors publishing his first critical essay in Canadian Literature (1973, editor George Woodcock) while he was still a graduate student.

This fellowship was at the invitation of Prof. Robert F. Harney, Academic Director (1976–89) of the Multicultual History Society of Ontario at U.of T. In Toronto he edited his first book, Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing (1985) which became a seminal volume for the promotion of ethnic minority literature in Canada.

From 1977 to 2015 he was professor of Comparative Literature at Athabasca University, Canada.

He is now Professor Emeritus.

He was born Giuseppe Pivato in Tezze sul Brenta (Stroppari), a town about 40 km north of Venice, Italy.

His mother was from Udine in the Friuli region east of Venice.

This Italian origin was to have a profound influence on his whole life and career as a writer, researcher and academic.

At the end of his doctoral program (1977) he began to work at Athabasca University, a distance education institution modeled after the British Open University.

At Athabasca he helped to develop the first courses in English literature, Canadian Literature, Comparative Literature and Theory.

His discovery began in 1978 when his poems were included in Roman Candles, the first anthology of Italian-Canadian poets edited by Pier Giorgio DiCicco.

This inspired him to present the first paper on Italian-Canadian writers at a national conference at Dalhousie University, Halifax in May, 1981.

This paper was rejected by several journals and was eventually published as "The Arrival of Italian-Canadian Writing," in Canadian Ethnic Studies 14,1 (1982).

In 1984 Pivato was research fellow in the Ethnic and Immigration Studies Program at the University of Toronto.

He conceived and co-edited the "Italian-Canadian Connections" issue of Canadian Literature 106 (1985).

He was founding president of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers (1986) which advances the work of these ethnic minority authors through critical publications, biennial conferences and book launches.

At Athabasca Pivato was Chair of the Centre for Language and Literature and developed the first courses in creative writing.

Pivato spent the year 1987-88 at York University in the Mariano Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies where he developed and taught the first course on Italian-Canadian writers.

The Research Institute for Comparative Literature in Edmonton invited him to edit Literatures of Lesser Diffusion (1990), the first collection of studies of writing by 20 different ethnic groups in Canada.

In 1991 he was Canadian Visiting Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

This sojourn resulted in the publication of Echo: Essays on Other Literatures (1994), a collection of original critical studies on Comparative Literature and minority writing, translation, oral influences on writing, ethnic women writers, and other topics.

Between 1997 and 2005 he pioneered Online courses at Athabasca by producing the first webpages for courses in English Literature, Canadian Literature, Comparative Literature and Theory.

In 2010 he was founding professor of the new M.A. in Literary Studies which is part of the MA-IS program.

He is married to Alberta psychologist, writer, academic and disabilities advocate Dr. Emma Pivato.

Their children include (1) Dr. Marcus J. Pivato, Prof. of Economics, Université Paris 1, Pantheon Sorbonne.

(2) Juliana Pivato, Artist and Academic in Toronto and (3) Alexis who has disabilities and lives at home.

They have 4 grandchildren.

Emma Pivato's novels include Blind Sight Solution (Chicago: Cozy Cat Press, 2013) The Crooked Knife (2014) Roscoe's Revenge (2014) Jessie Knows (2015) Murder on Highway 2 (2016) Deadly Care (2016) Healthy Bodies Also Die (2019) and Postpartum Dead (2021).

In 2021 Emma Pivato published And along came Alexis a powerful memoir of life with a severely disabled daughter (Guernica Editions).

Joseph Pivato promotes Italian-Canadian writing by using the theories of Comparative Literature.

As a literature which exists in three languages: English, French and Italian, it lends itself to discussions on translation, influences, ethnic identity, migration and appropriation.