Lecture by Mia Fuller, part of University by Design event series

Mia Fuller, cultural anthropologist and urban-architectural historian, will lecture on Tuesday 15 October at 5 pm. Her lecture is part of the Fall 2024 University by Design event series, co-produced by the Architecture Programs of the Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Syracuse University in Florence, California State University International Programs Italy and Kent State University Florence. It will be held at the Murate Art District (Piazza delle Murate, Firenze).

Mia Fuller’s lecture, titled Nation, Colony, Empire, and Expectations: Italy’s Settler Colonial Designs in Context(s), addresses designs for state-sponsored Italian settlements in the modern Italian colonial era (1869-1943), with an emphasis on the 1930s, when the Fascist regime financed and oversaw settlements for relocated Italians within Italy’s national borders and in the formal African colonies too, with only minor variations between the ideas informing their architectural and urban designs.

Do the continuities in design between ‘nation’ and ‘colony’ or ‘Empire’ matter when it comes to our understandings of these sites? (Historians tend to think that yes, while architectural historians not as much.) And does the fact that the government at the time insisted on the expression “internal colonization” mean that we should regard internal-settlement programs as “colonial” ones? (Historians tend to think that no, while architectural historians are more easily convinced.) And, ultimately, how do these decisions about interpretation shape our understandings of Fascist and colonial vestiges?

Dr. Mia Fuller is Gladyce Arata Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist, she writes on Italian colonial and fascist architecture and urbanism (Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, Italian Imperialism, 2007; contributions to Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture, 2020, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia African History, 2020). She is completing a new book on the post-Fascist endurance of the 1930s land-reclamation and internal settlement program in Italy’s Pontine Marshes, titled Monuments and Mussolini: A Cultural History of Fascist Memory.