You can watch the recording of this event on our podcast page as well as on our YouTube channel.

It is our pleasure to invite you to a book talk with Diana Garvin, the author of Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work. Hosted by Brian J Griffith, the event will take place online via a Zoom webinar on Friday, April 22, 2022 at 11:00am Pacific Time. Brian J Griffith writes and teaches courses on the political and cultural history of modern Europe, with a special emphasis on Fascist Italy, food history, and digital and public history. He is currently serving as the 2020-2022 Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History at the History Department of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and organized in association with the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, the webinar is open to members both of UCLA’s campus community and the general public, although pre-registration is required.

The book talk is affiliated with the course Interwar Crisis: Europe, 1918-1939 taught by Brian J Griffith at the UCLA History Department in Spring 2022. The course explores the various political, economic, social, and cultural upheavals which took place in Europe between the two world wars, and asks its participants to consider the various parallels between developments during the 1920s and 1930s and today’s international community. The course has a public facing, student authored weblog, which invites readers to interact with the volume’s weekly content.

BOOK ABSTRACT

Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labor. The book looks at women’s experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women’s political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations – cooking, feeding, and eating – to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.

BOOK DETAILS

Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work was published by University of Toronto Press in February 2022. You check the contents of the book and reviews here.

AUTHOR

Diana Garvin is Assistant Professor of Italian with a focus on Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon.

EVENT FLYER

Click on the link below to download the event flyer.

Download file: 2022-0422_Flyer-go-gdm.pdf

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Department of History, Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles