smh@ucsb.edu
Phelps 5323
Stephanie Malia Hom is Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies, Vice Chair of French & Italian, and Director of the Italian Program. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Comparative Literature.
She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell, 2019), which won the 2019 AAIS Book Prize (20th and 21st century), and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, 2015). She also co-edited with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the edited volume Italian Mobilities (Routledge, 2016), and with Claudio Fogu and Laura E. Ruberto the special issue of California Italian Studies (2019) on “Borderless Italy/Italia senza frontiere.” Her essays and articles have been published in wide range of venues, including the leading journals in the fields of Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore. She has also worked as a journalist in the U.S. and Europe. For her research, Hom has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Academy in Rome, American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Bogliasco Foundation, Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture, Harvard University, Stanford Humanities Center, and The Nantucket Project. She earned her MA and PhD in Italian Studies at UC Berkeley, and a BA with honors in International Relations from Brown University.
She is currently working on two book projects: one that explores the dynamics of coerced mobilities in the experiences of Mediterranean slavery and Italian colonialism, and another that examines the ideological roots of the myth that Italy is colorblind, tracing this belief back to the fictional narratives produced about colonialism in the era during and immediately after Italy's direct colonial rule. She is also co-editing a volume with Dana Renga titled, Crime Italian Style: Illegality and the Making of Italy, which is under contract with Liverpool University Press in its Transnational Italian Cultures book series.
She regularly teaches courses on Transnational Italian Studies (Italian 120X), Biopolitics and Medical Humanities (Italian 139YX), Italian Colonialism (Italian 139CX), Tourism and Travel Literature (Italian 139TX), and Gastronomic Italy (Italian 139FX).