This year the Society wishes to acknowledge the scholarly accomplishments of Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University. Spanning four decades, de Grazia’s work has been a model for generations of scholars eager to make the history of post-Unification Italy relevant to broader concerns about modernity writ large. Her scholarship has not only broken new ground by addressing previously neglected topics, but also offered a subtle and yet powerful methodological approach to the study of social change across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. By combining intellectual rigor and empathetic engagement, Professor de Grazia has managed to rise above all the “turns” our profession has taken in recent decades, charting a unique course that has remained both coherent and capacious. Indeed, her work has set an enduring standard for the study of modern Italy by steering clear of theoretical fads and facile categorizations.
Victoria de Grazia is first all an historian of Italian fascism. Her first book, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (1981) grew out of a 1976 dissertation that this very Society awarded with a prize for the best unpublished manuscript. This is the first systematic study of the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, the largest organization in fascist Italy and the model for similar ventures in interwar Europe, including Nazi Germany’s Strength Through Joy. Breaking through the strictures of institutional history, this study looks at Fascism in its complex and contradictory dimensions, both from the perspective of the regime leaders and from that of a society that accommodated some of the regime’s goals without ever completely losing its agency and autonomy. In de Grazia’s hands, the organization of leisure becomes a prism through which the regime’s blandishments and coercive acts are examined in their mundane and yet sinister instantiations. By listening to a multitude of voices and following an astonishing variety of trajectories, de Grazia is able to build towards a thoroughly historical definition of Fascism, laid bare in its petty compromises and grotesque ambitions, without however dismissing the role of ideology and the power of mass regimentation.
The same methodological subtlety and interpretative panache informed de Grazia’s second major monograph, How Fascism Ruled Women (1992), a pioneering study of the ways the regime buttressed traditional gender roles while acting as a modernizing force in other contexts, not always intentionally. Here, too, Professor de Grazia avoids easy generalizations and charts a landscape of great complexity, shaped by class and geographical distinctions that the regime failed to challenge in significant ways. And here, too, she approaches social change from a holistic perspective, with a keen eye for the revealing example and the concrete (and often contradictory) experience. At the height of the “linguistic turn” in gender history, de Grazia wrote a book in which discourse and materiality informed each other, crafting a kind of social history open to the suggestions of cultural analysis but firmly rooted in the multifaceted experience of historical actors. By the end of the century, decades of reflection on the contradictions and aspirations of Fascism had made de Grazia one of the most visible and productive experts on the history of interwar Italy. The crowning achievement of this trajectory was perhaps her work as editor, with Sergio Luzzatto, of the Dizionario del Fascismo (2000), a monumental volume with 660 entries by 180 international scholars.
Another major strand in de Grazia’s scholarship has dealt with the history of consumption, viewed as a major terrain where the lures and contradictions of modernity come in full relief. Her edited collection, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (1996) represented a pioneering intervention and remains an influential contribution to this literature. Consumer culture and consumption practices also play a crucial role in Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe (2005), a monumental study of the ways Europeans have negotiated the rising cultural and economic hegemony of the Unites States since World War One. Here, too, de Grazia deftly weaves the specific, often told in vibrant detail, into general analytical patterns that encompass socio-economic and cultural relations. The book’s narrative sidesteps the discourses spun by the usual dozen intellectuals who tend to populate the literature on anti-Americanism in favor of lived experiences and local meanings. This is transnational history at its best, at once grounded in its empirical focus and daring in its ability to explore connections and exchanges. Italy figures prominently in this book, as one of the sites in which American artifacts and ways of life proved particularly alluring and controversial.
Professor de Grazia’s books have won several important prizes. Her research was supported by many organizations, including the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome. She has been a visiting scholar at many prestigious institutions, most notably the European University Institute in Florence. She has also been a leader for the profession at large, for example by chairing the Council for European Studies. Finally, she has mentored many younger historians of modern Italy, several of whom are now prominent scholars in the field. In sum, de Grazia’s career has been exemplary in its scholarly depth and versatility, in its intellectual rigor and independence, and in its generosity of spirit.
Giovanna Benadusi (Chair, SIHS Citation Committee)
Dario Gaggio
Sarah Ross