Brian J Griffith > Research Interests

Research Interests

My interest in modern European history was born out of my experiences with what John Foot has aptly named Italy's Divided Memory. On my first trip to Italy in April 2005, I was immediately struck by the contradictory layers of history on display; a dissonance of both past and present—intertwined and, yet, distinct—I had not experienced in the United States. I returned to Italy in 2007, and again in 2011, each of these visits amplifying and reinforcing my fascination with recent Italian history.

A key aspect of my research interests, thematically woven throughout many of my research projects, is the cultural legacy of the Ventennio nero, or Black Decades. From the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, with its fascist-era administrative buildings snaking along its perimeter, to Piazza Matteotti in Naples, flanked on each corner by monumental fascist-era structures, the legacy of the previous century continues to haunt Italy's visual, cultural, and psychological landscapes. However, interwar Italy was not the only location in which Italian Fascism occurred. Rather, Italian Fascism was the product of a dialectical conversation between Italy's center and its many, now former, peripheries. Both were the mutual products of intercultural exchange; both bear the still-visible imprints of the Ventennio. I have sought to incorporate this much broader, expanded view of the origins and locations of Italian Fascism and its cultural legacy in both Italy and abroad within my own research and writing.

Some of my most recent research projects have included studies of Fascist Italy's colonial campaign in East Africa. By placing Italy's colonization of Ethiopia within the larger context of modern Italy's inferior political position in Western Europe, I sought to further illuminate the cultural and psychological origins of the regime's colonial and racial policies in both Africa and Italy. In addition to these, I am currently in the process of transcribing and editing the collected papers of Ruth Williams Ricci, a fascist sympathizer from New York City who served both as a volunteer nurse in the Italian Red Cross and, later, as a freelance journalist during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. In this project, I seek to contextualize Ricci's extraordinary experiences in both Fascist Italy and its various peripheral regions within the larger context of Italian Fascism as an international system of political and cultural exchange, involving many more than just peninsular Italians. Lastly, I have several planned research projects, including a study of the ways in which Italy's wine industry was appropriated, transformed, and utilized by the regime to spread the gospel of fascism to both domestic and international audiences (Cultivating Fascism: Wine Production in Italy, 1922-1945), a study of the connections between Italian Fascism and Rastafarianism, and a cultural history of the Roma-Sinti in Fascist Italy, specifically in the city of Rome (Roma: The Eternal City and Its 'Gypsies,' 1922-1945).