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: Costanza Bonelli
Costanza Bonelli, “‘Some typically African risks:’ Safeguarding the health of Italian settlers during the fascist empire (1934-1941),” Centaurus, 65, 2023, pp. 121-152
The Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) is pleased to congratulate Costanza Bonelli for winning this year’s prize for outstanding article in Modern Italian History with her piece “‘Some typically African risks:’ Safeguarding the health of Italian settlers during the fascist empire (1934-1941),” published in Centaurus in 2023. In this broadly conceived article, Bonelli examines the contributions of politically connected medical experts to the fascist colonial project, paying particular attention to their contradictory approaches to the question of “acclimatization” of soldiers, workers, and settlers to the Horn of Africa’s diverse landscapes. Bonelli follows these experts as they debate the risks and opportunities of “white” settlement in Ethiopia, propagandize their theories to a wider public, and influence the policies of social insurance institutions. The article exposes to great effect the experts’ contradictory attempts to reconcile the alleged racial superiority of Italians with their crushing experiences of vulnerability. These conceptual gyrations, Bonelli shows, informed the chaotic workings of hospitals, worksites, and government offices. Nimbly deploying the methodological toolkits of the history of science, environmental history, and policy history, Bonelli provides a compelling account of the biopolitical specificities of fascist colonialism and its reliance on the complicity of medical experts.
Winner: Caterina Scalvedi
Caterina Scalvedi, “The Missionary at the Gates of “Dawn”: Educational Continuities from Fascist Somalia through the UN Order (1920s–50s),” Northeast African Studies, 22, no. 1, 2023, pp. 45-99.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) is pleased to congratulate Caterina Scalvedi for winning this year’s prize for outstanding article in Modern Italian History with her piece “The Missionary at the Gates of “Dawn”: Educational Continuities from Fascist Somalia through the UN Order (1920s–50s),” published in Northeast African Studies in 2023. The article examines the role of Catholic missionaries—both nuns and friars—in Italian-language education in Somalia, revealing striking continuities between the fascist period and the 1950s, when Italy held a UN trusteeship over its former colony. Under fascism, Italian missionaries were the primary organizers of Italian-language schools, and largely focused on training students, particularly orphans, to meet the needs of the military and the colonial labor market. Working in state and missionary archives in Italy and the UK, Scalvedi shows how textbooks and curricula aimed to produce docile workers who could be inserted into the colony’s racial, social, and gendered hierarchies. Building on this impressive research, Scalvedi then demonstrates the persistence of this education system under British occupation (1941-1949) and after the “return” of Italy to Somalia as UN Trustee in 1949. Well into the 1950s, she argues convincingly, the Italian-language schools and their missionary teachers continued to present Italy, now a Republic, as a benevolent, paternalistic, and modernizing colonial state committed to preparing the Somali population for skilled labor.
Honorable Mention: Matilde Cazzola
Matile Cazzola, “The Strange Case of Dr. Giustiniani and Mr. Hirsch: The Incomplete History of an Imposture, 1790s-1855,” Quaderni Storici, August, 2023, pp. 457-488.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is pleased to award honorable mention to Matilde Cazzola for her article “The Strange Case of Dr. Giustiniani and Mr. Hirsch: The Incomplete History of an Imposture, 1790s-1855,” published in Quaderni Storici in 2023. We congratulate Cazzola for her tour-de-force article, which takes the reader on a breathtaking journey across three continents, to uncover the secret life of an Anglican missionary who traveled under many names, and many identities. Cazzola shows us that reality is not always what it seems: the Hungarian-Jewish Jakab Szarvas, the Rome-residing Catholic Giacobbe Hirsch, and the Australian-based Anglican Louis Giustiniani were not three different people, but one and the same man, who criss-crossed countries, converted and reconverted to new religions, and refashioned his identity again and again. In the process, Cazzola not only sheds light on what it meant to be a name-changing, rule-defying, border-crosser in the early 19th century; she also uncovers the fascinating tale of a Jewish-Catholic-Anglical man who was the first European to demand that indigenous prisoners in Western Australia be treated as human beings, and provided with legal representation. Cazzola takes us behind the scenes, piecing together the portrait of this evasive figure through archives scattered in nine countries and in six languages. In the process, she provides us with a new perspective on the history of imperialism, the history of religious conversion, and the history of Italy in the wider world.
Past Recipients
- 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”