Events

Join us!

• Visit the Italian Academy: register here  

• Attend remotely on Zoom: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/93014447485?pwd=nQGWt98X6PkxJzmTwVbkcHp9rRSCS4.1   (Meeting ID: 930 1444 7485; Passcode: 903818)

This is the second of two international conferences: Rome (Bibliotheca Hertziana, December 4-5, 2025) and New York (Italian Academy, March 26, 2026).

Italian museums and private homes hold a substantial number of objects intertwined with the history of colonialism. Their conservation raises questions about their cultural and political significance, alongside debates regarding their provenance and the practices surrounding their restitution. Furthermore, these objects still circulate widely — through auctions, marketplaces, and passed down through family inheritances. Despite this pervasive presence, the growing scholarship on Italian colonialism has not placed material culture at the center of analysis. 

Indeed, although Italian colonial visual culture, exhibition history, and museum collections garner increasing scholarly attention, the objects themselves often remain on the margins of inquiry. Furthermore, no specific methodology has been developed for the study of colonial material culture, resulting in a gap in both historical and art historical research.

Bearing traces of their makers and owners, objects act upon bodily experience, affect, and emotions. Our aim is to address the production and circulation of colonial objects to understand their active role in shaping colonial imaginaries, visual culture, and imperial ideologies, and their contribution to the formation of tropes surrounding race, gender, class, and nationhood, both in Italy and abroad. Focusing on the dialectical relationship between the facture of objects and the meanings they produce, we are thus interested in exploring how colonial objects shape memories and ideas, and how their circulation during colonial rule as well as their current preservation yield insights into the negotiations of colonial legacies by colonizers and colonized subjects alike.

These two conferences originate from a collaboration among the research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture of the Weddigen Department of the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History, the Contemporary History section of the German Historical Institute in Rome, and the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York, with the generous support of the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities.

Co-sponsors:     
German Historical Institute in Rome
Bibliotheca Hertziana     
Ragusa Foundation

Operning Remarks:
Barbara Faedda (Ad Interim Director, Italian Academy)  

Organizers:      
Carmen Belmonte (Università degli Studi di Padova/ Bibliotheca Hertziana - MPI, former Fellow at the Italian Academy) 
Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth University/ Università Roma Tre, former Fellow at the Italian Academy) 
Bianca Gaudenzi (Università degli Studi di Firenze/ Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) 
Laura Moure Cecchini (Università degli Studi di Padova)

PROGRAM 

09:30 - 10:00  Registration and welcome coffee


10:00 - 10:30 Welcoming remarks 
Barbara Faedda (Italian Academy, Columbia University) 
Carmen Belmonte (Università degli Studi di Padova/ Bibliotheca Hertziana - MPI, former Fellow at the Italian Academy) and Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth University/ Università Roma Tre, former Fellow at the Italian Academy)
Petra Terhoeven (German Historical Institute in Rome) and Tristan Weddigen (Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History)


10:45 - 12:15 Panel I: Colonial Objects on the Move
Chair: Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth University/ Università Roma Tre, former Fellow at the Italian Academy)

Lauren Bartone (University of California, Berkeley), Cotton Dreams: From New Orleans to Palermo and Back Again

Angelo Caglioti (Barnard College), Portable Knowledge: Travel Guidebooks, Scientific Instruments, and the Production of the Imperialist Self
 

12:15 - 1:15 Break

1:15 - 3:30 Panel II: Consuming the Empire
Chair: Bianca Gaudenzi (Università degli Studi di Firenze/ Wolfson College, University of Cambridge)

Diana Garvin (University of Oregon), Pitching Coffee to Sell the War

Andrew Denning (University of Kansas), Fiat Africana: Motor Vehicles, the Colonial Imaginary, and Materializing Empire

Ignacio Galán (Barnard College), ‘Nomad’ Equipment: Furnishing the Empire


3:30 - 4:00  Break


4:00 - 5:30 Panel III: Afterlives of Colonial Objects
Chair: Carmen Belmonte (Università degli Studi di Padova/ Bibliotheca Hertziana - MPI, former Fellow at the Italian Academy) 

Brian McLaren (University of Washington), The Culture of Italian Colonial Printed Material: Between Document and Index

Shauna LaTosky (University of Northern British Columbia), The Lure of the Labret in (Post)colonial Imaginaries

Final discussion
Moderator: Laura Moure Cecchini (Università degli Studi di Padova)

^{Image: Alberto Salietti, On the desk, 1946, oil on plywood, private collection. Courtesy Il Ponte Casa d’Aste}