Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
IES and the Department of Italian Studies host a discussion with Professor Claudio Fogu (UC Santa Barbara) on his book, "The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Fogu's book explores the role of the Mediterranean in the ‘making of Italians’ from a transnational and transcolonial perspective. Reinterpreting key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and, in particular the discursive construction of the “southern question," the book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. Mediterranean imaginaries, Fogu argues, acted as counterweights to the solidification of a national form of identity by offering alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.
Claudio Fogu is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the Mediterranean imaginaries developed in Italian culture and thought. Fogu teaches courses on Italian cultural history and memory, with an emphasis on film and visual culture. He is the author of The Historic Imaginary. Politics of History in Fascist Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2003), and co-editor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke UP, 2006), Metahistory’s Fortieth Anniversary (Storia e Storiografia, 2015), and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard UP, 2016).
IES and the Department of Italian Studies host a discussion with Professor Claudio Fogu (UC Santa Barbara) on his book, "The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Fogu's book explores the role of the Mediterranean in the ‘making of Italians’ from a transnational and transcolonial perspective. Reinterpreting key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and, in particular the discursive construction of the “southern question," the book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. Mediterranean imaginaries, Fogu argues, acted as counterweights to the solidification of a national form of identity by offering alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.
Claudio Fogu is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the Mediterranean imaginaries developed in Italian culture and thought. Fogu teaches courses on Italian cultural history and memory, with an emphasis on film and visual culture. He is the author of The Historic Imaginary. Politics of History in Fascist Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2003), and co-editor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke UP, 2006), Metahistory’s Fortieth Anniversary (Storia e Storiografia, 2015), and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard UP, 2016).
