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 2023 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 2025.
A digital version of the article should be submitted to the SIHS prize committee at SIHS.modern@gmail.com by July 1, 2024. 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.
To Apply send to SIHS.modern@gmail.com:
- Digital (pdf) version of article in published or FirstView format
- One-page CV (pdf), indicating PhD status (if in progress or when it was completed)
Award Committee
Dario Gaggio (Committee Chair)
Professor of History
University of Michigan
dariog@umich.edu
Michael Ebner
Professor of History
Syracuse University
mebner@syr.edu
Giuliana Chamedes
Professor of History
University of Wisconsin-Madison
chamedes@wisc.edu
This Year’s Recipients – Winner: Michele Sollai
Michele Sollai, “How to Feed an Empire?: Agrarian Science, Indigenous Farming, and Wheat Autarky in Italian-Occupied Ethiopia, 1937–1941,” Agricultural History 96, no. 3 (August 1, 2022): 379–416.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is happy to announce this year’s recipient of the Article Prize in Modern Italian History. We congratulate Michele Sollai for his article “How to Feed an Empire? Agrarian Science, Indigenous Farming, and Wheat Autarky in Italian-Occupied Ethiopia, 1937-1942,” published in Agricultural History (2022). The essay examines the failed attempts by the fascist regime to make Italian East Africa self-sufficient in grain production by adopting a sophisticated ecological perspective that takes seriously the interactions between humans, non-human actors, and their environments. This perspective allows Sollai to nuance the contours of colonial practices and highlight the active roles played by indigenous knowledge in negotiating colonial power and its experimental ambitions. Sollai shows a remarkable ability to connect Ethiopia’s brief colonial experience to a longer genealogy linking pre-existing Italian agricultural projects to the worldwide spread of high-productivity agriculture after WWII. The essay meticulously analyzes the complexity of colonial agricultural practices in Ethiopia while ambitiously setting them in a global context of techno-scientific exchanges and political projects.
Honorable Mention: Diana Garvin
Diana Garvin, “Building Pasta’s Empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa,” Modern Italy 28, no. 2 (May 2023): 97–126.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is pleased to award an Honorable Mention, recognizing Diana Garvin’s “Building Pasta’s Empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa” published in Modern Italy (2022). The article marshals a laudably rich selection of archival, visual, and economic materials showing the depth of the Barilla pasta company’s involvement in the fascist regime’s exploitation of colonial settings. By showing each link in the chain leading from colonial wheat cultivation to pasta dishes at Italians’ dinner tables, including Barilla’s packaging and advertising, Garvin highlights commercial pasta’s place in imperialist propaganda while also showing that big business made cultural consumption integral to the physical consumption of industrially produced food. The article shows clearly that ordinary pasta today can still carry direct – if unacknowledged – legacies of Italian Empire and contributes to the wider scholarship arguing that Italian culinary ‘identity’ has often been made from above.
Honorable Mention: Markus Wurzer
Markus Wurzer, “The Social Lives of Mass-Produced Images of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War,” Modern Italy 27, no. 4 (November 2022): 351–73.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is also happy to award a second Honorable Mention to Markus Wurzer for his article “The Social Lives of Mass-Produced Images of the 1935-41 Italo-Ethiopian War” published in Modern Italy (2022). In this beautifully written essay Wurzer provides an original reading of ordinary soldiers’ uses of mass-produced images of Ethiopia in the context of the Italian fascist war and occupation. Conceptually rich and methodologically astute, Wurzer’s article advances significantly our understanding of the private uses of the public images that the regime produced to build consensus among its population. Focusing on the postcard collections of a number of so-called allogeni (in this case the German-speaking inhabitants of the province of Bozen/Bolzano), the article enriches the important historiography that makes use of visual sources and helps us to understand the soldiers’ attitudes towards the fascist colonial war in an Italian region of recent annexation.
Past Recipients
- 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”