Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History

The Society for Italian Historical Studies, in affiliation with the American Historical Association, regularly administers three annual Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prizes in Italian History.

The late Howard R. Marraro made bequests to the American Historical Association, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Society for Italian Historical studies, for the award by each society of a Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History. Each association has appointed its own selection committee. The amount of the annual award to be made by the SIHS is $750.00. 

Each award will be given for the book deemed best by the various committees and published during the previous calendar year, which treats of Italian history in any epoch, Italian cultural history, or Italian-American relations. Entries must be published in English by historians whose usual residence is in North America.

The Marraro Prize is administered via the American Historical Association; to submit an entry, please consult the instructions at http://www.historians.org/awards-and-grants/awards-and-prizes/helen-and-howard-r-marraro-prize.

For further information, please contact SIHS Executive Secretary James Palmer.

 

This Year’s Recipient

---

Franco Baldasso, Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy. (Fordham University Press, 2022)

From the Award Committee: “Franco Baldasso’s Against Redemption expertly addresses the Italian literary scene after the fall of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime at the end of the Second World War. His examination of authors like Carlo Levi, Vitaliano Brancati, Giuseppe Berto, and Curzio Malaparte presents challenges, nuance, and new vistas to the dominant Neorealist and Resistance literature of the postwar years. Based on impressive research and convincingly argued, Baldasso’s work alters how we consider collective memory in the transition from Fascist to post-Fascist Italy.”

From the Publisher: “How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory.

During Italy’s transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that character­ized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.”

 

Past Recipients

---