Ruth W. Lo

Brown University

Feeding Rome: food, architecture, and urbanism during Fascism

2018-2019: Spring

Ruth Lo is Visiting Lecturer in the Urban Studies Program at Brown University. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, and her MA in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University. She was a Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome from 2013 to 2015. Her research is in the environmental humanities and integrates the study of science and technology to analyze the use of the built environment to manage humans and resources. 

Her book project, Landscape of Control: Food, Eugenics, and the Built Environment in Fascist Italy, is an interdisciplinary study on the built environment through an examination of its intersections with nature, culture, politics, science, and technology. Connecting food to modern Italian discourses of social and racial hygiene, she explores the reciprocal relationship between agricultural breeding and medical genetics to analyze the architecture and landscape of Italy and Italian East Africa. These sites range from reclaimed farmlands to an agricultural experiment station, granaries and milk plants to market halls.