Pamela Ballinger

Bowdoin College

Italy's Forgotten Refugees

2005-2006

Pamela Ballinger is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College. She holds degrees from Stanford University (B.A. 1990), Cambridge University (M. Phil. 1991), and Johns Hopkins University (M.A. 1994, Ph.D.1998). She is author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (2003, Princeton University Press). She has published on topics that include D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume, Trieste and "imperial nostalgia," the Adriatic "seascape," hybridity, and the repressed memory movement. Her current book project takes the fate of the Italian populations of Istria as a starting point for analyzing the broader topic of the "return" of Italian nationals to peninsular Italy from former Italian possessions after World War II. She is also interested in issues of coastal development in contemporary Croatia, having begun a new ethnographic project that examines meanings of place, the politics of vacation homes, and the reconfiguration of the tourist industry in Istria.