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.
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. Angelo Caglioti
Email: acagliot@barnard.edu
Website: https://history.columbia.edu/person/angelo-caglioti/
2026 Recipients – Winner: Claire Dillon
Claire Dillon, “Transforming Cefalù in Mogadishu: The Arabo-Normanna Cathedral of Italian Somalia and the Façade of ‘Peaceful Conquest’,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 84 (2025): 368-385.
This article is an original and important contribution to the history of Italian colonialism, fascism, and architecture. Through a close study of the Cathedral of Mogadishu, Dillon reveals how Italian colonial authorities appropriated selective historical and architectural features of Norman Sicily to construct a narrative of cultural coexistence and “peaceful conquest” in Somalia. She demonstrates, however, that this rhetoric of accommodation was deeply entangled with Catholic triumphalism, racial hierarchy, coercive labor, and colonial violence. Drawing extensively on missionary archives, colonial records, architectural plans, correspondence, newspapers, and contemporary accounts, Dillon innovatively reconstructs the negotiations behind the cathedral’s design and construction, exposing the gap between its celebratory representation and the exploitation of the Somali labor that built it. While previous scholarship focused on forced labor in Italian agricultural plantations in Somalia, Dillon documents this practice in the heart of Somalia’s capital. By bringing architectural history into conversation with the histories of fascism, religion, labor, and empire, Dillon reveals the competing political meanings that state and religious actors attached to the built environment. Architecture did not merely symbolize colonial power; it manufactured historical legitimacy and reconciled the contradictions of Italian imperialism. The history of this neglected monument thus opens a broader perspective on how the fascist regime mobilized the longstanding internal orientalism of Sicily’s medieval past in the service of colonial rule. The committee is happy to confer the SIHS Prize to Dillon’s article for its originality, exceptional archival research, and ability to creatively connect medieval and modern Italian history.
Honorable Mention: Lewis Ewan Driver
Lewis Ewan Driver, “Rethinking campanilismo: Community and conflict in Fascist Arezzo, 1922-1925” Contemporary European History 34 (2025): 1-17.
This article examines one of the most common and yet understudied tropes in modern Italian history, campanilismo, in the context of the rise and consolidation of fascism in central Italy. The author convincingly demonstrates that, in contrast to other instances of right-wing authoritarianism such as German National Socialism and Francoism in Spain, Italian fascism struggled to reconcile localism with the regime’s principles and practices. Unlike the affective attachments of Heimat and patria chica, which Hitler and Franco managed to nationalize to some extent, attachment to the campanile remained, in the Arezzo province, a source of resistance and friction at both the social and cultural levels. Drawing on a range of previously untapped primary sources, from ordinary people’s memoirs to local government reports, the author shows how stubborn local identities weakened party discipline and cohesion while fueling acts of everyday resistance to fascist violence. These dysfunctions give the lie to the tropes peddled by the intellectuals affiliated with the strapaese movement, among others. Through a comparative and interdisciplinary conceptual apparatus, the article shows how deeply rooted local anecdotes can illuminate paradigmatic historical processes. The committee was impressed by the article’s methodological sophistication and by the poignancy of its historiographical intervention.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lewis-driver
Past Recipients
- 2025 – Daniel Banks, Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860
- 2025 – Matteo D’Avanzo, Jews as Agents of Colonization: Italian Jewry, Carlo Alberto Viterbo and the Ethiopian Jews
- 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”