The SIHS Article Prize for Modern Italian History will be awarded to the best English-language, peer-reviewed journal article made public (either in published form or on a “FirstView platform”) in the calendar year 2025 on Italian history broadly defined by an early career author. The time period for “modern” includes any time period from the Napoleonic Wars to today. Geographical scope and disciplinary methodology are defined in the broadest possible terms. Early career refers to anyone who is in the process of completing their PhD or anyone who was within 6 years of completion when the article was made public. Only members of the Society of Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) will be considered (membership to SIHS for anyone without a tenure track job is $10/year, for tenure track faculty it is $30/year). The award will be presented at the annual SIHS meeting at the American Historical Association in January 2026.
A digital version of the article should be submitted to the chair of the committee, Dario Gaggio, at dariog@umich.edu, by July 1, 2026 with a one-page CV attached that indicates PhD status or date of completion. The prize consists of a $100 monetary reward, as well as a feature on the SIHS website including comments on why the article was selected and an interview with the author published on the SIHS website.
If you have any questions concerning this article prize, feel free to contact the committee through the above email.
Award Committee
Prof. Dario Gaggio (Chair)
Email: dariog@umich.edu
Website: https://lsa.umich.edu/history/people/faculty/dariog.html
Prof. Lauren Braun-Strumfels
Email: lbs@cedarcrest.edu
Website: https://www.cedarcrest.edu/staff/lauren-braun-strumfels/
Prof. Massimo Caglioti
Email: acagliot@barnard.edu
Website: https://history.columbia.edu/person/angelo-caglioti/
2025 Recipients – Winner: Daniel Banks
Daniel Banks, Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860, Past & Present, 2024, pp. 1-36.
This article reframes the history of Italian unification and helps us understand a new dimension of why Garibaldi’s campaign against the Bourbon army was successful. Taking us behind the scenes, Banks shows that the Garibaldi expedition was enabled by more than rag-tag idealists and good public relations propaganda; its victories were also made possible through a carefully planned logistical revolution, carried out by businessmen, traders, and economic non-state actors. Shedding new light on the history of capitalism, on Genoa as a geopolitical and revolutionary hub, and on the transnational dimensions of the Risorgimento in exile, we learn how committed radicals mobilized the structures of international capitalism in favor of their cause. Through a rich array of archival, primary, and secondary sources, Banks shows us how complex networks of trade, donations, and shipping criss-crossed the Mediterranean and bolstered the Garibaldi mille. The logistics of revolution thus brought the ships, guns, and money that enabled the “Hero of the Two Worlds” to help create a unified Italy.
Honorable Mention: Matteo D’Avanzo
Matteo D’Avanzo, Jews as Agents of Colonization: Italian Jewry, Carlo Alberto Viterbo and the Ethiopian Jews, Contemporanea, Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ‘900, 1/2024, pp. 25-46.
This article investigates an underexplored aspect of modern Jewish and modern Italian history: the role of the Italian Jewish community during the Fascist invasion and colonization of Ethiopia in the mid 1930s. D’Avanzo follows the journey of the Florentine lawyer Carlo Alberto Viterbo, a prominent representative of the Jewish community tapped by the Unione delle Comunità Israelitiche Italiane in 1936 to travel to Addis Ababa to carry out a survey of Ethiopian Jews. As D’Avanzo shows, Viterbo’s journey–which received the endorsement of Fascist authorities–left a rich archive, documenting the transnational nature of the Italian imperial project and the surprising role of Italian Jews as agents of colonization. Viterbo’s activism indeed had two goals: on the one hand, he encouraged Italian Jews to participate in the colonial project of “civilizing” Ethiopia and Ethiopian Jews, while on the other, he mobilized a transnational philanthropic network to endorse Italian Fascist actions in a bid to assimilate “black Jews” into a Western Jewish framework. In this way, D’Avanzo offers preliminary answers to crucial questions asked by early pioneers in the field: Where are Jews in colonial history? And where is colonialism in Jewish history? At the same time, he foregrounds an additional question, which we hope will continue to receive more scholarly attention: Where are Italian Jews in the Fascist colonization of Ethiopia, and in the transnational legitimation of the Fascist imperial project?
Past Recipients
- 2024 – Costanza Bonelli, “‘Some typically African risks:’ Safeguarding the health of Italian settlers during the fascist empire (1934-1941).”
- 2024 – Caterina Scalvedi, “The Missionary at the Gates of “Dawn”: Educational Continuities from Fascist Somalia through the UN Order (1920s–50s).”
- 2024 – Matilde Cazzola, “The Strange Case of Dr. Giustiniani and Mr. Hirsch: The Incomplete History of an Imposture, 1790s-1855.”
- 2023 – Michele Sollai, “How to Feed an Empire?: Agrarian Science, Indigenous Farming, and Wheat Autarky in Italian-Occupied Ethiopia, 1937–1941.”
- 2023 – Diana Garvin, “Building Pasta’s Empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa.”
- 2023 – Markus Wurzer, “The Social Lives of Mass-Produced Images of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War.”.
- 2022 – Gregory D. Milano, “The Class Without Consciousness: Fascism’s ‘New’ Workers and the 1942 World’s Fair in Rome”
- 2022 – Gianmarco Mancosu, “Watching Films in Italian East Africa (1936-1941): Fascist Ambitions, Contradictions, and Anxieties”
- 2021 – Brian J Griffith, “Bacchus among the Blackshirts: Wine Making, Consumerism and Identity in Fascist Italy, 1919-1937”
- 2021 (Honorable Mention) – Glauco Schettini, “Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church and the French Revolution, c. 1775–1800”