About

Stephanie Malia Hom is a Professor of Transnational Italian Studies and Chair of the Department of French & Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching focus on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She has authored the book Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention, which won the 2019 AAIS Book Prize, and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy. Additionally, she co-edited volumes on Italian legality and mobility. Trained in literary criticism and cultural anthropology, her essays have been published in leading journals across Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore. Her research has been supported by fellowships from numerous prestigious institutions, including the American Council of Learned Societies, American Academy in Rome, and Harvard University. She holds a BA with honors in International Relations from Brown University, and earned her MA and PhD in Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is working on two book projects exploring coerced mobilities in Mediterranean slavery and Italian colonialism, and examining the ideological roots of the myth that Italy is colorblind. She regularly teaches courses on transnational Italian Studies, biopolitics, medical humanities, Italian colonialism, crime, tourism, and gastronomic Italy, and is accepting MA/PhD students.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• History
• Social Science
• Literature
• Anthropology
• Art
• Classics
• Environmental ethics
• Epistemology
• Economic geography
• Biology
• Geography
• Cartography
• Ecology

Selected publications

• A tribute to Nelson Graburn: the joy of tourism research

  Tourism Geographies · 2025-02-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores nelson Graburn's enduring impact on the field of tourism studies, specifically through his mentorship of students and colleagues, his boundless energy organizing colloquia for the uc Berkeley Tourism studies Working Group, and his creation of a global kinship network of tourism researchers.The author also reflects on her personal connection to Graburn, who served as her dissertation advisor, and their experiences in the field doing tourism research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The fiction of colorblind Italy and Orio Vergani's <i>Io, povero negro</i> (1929)

  Forum Italicum A Journal of Italian Studies · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Art

  Taking aim at the myth that il razzismo non esiste in Italy, this article explores the rhetorical mechanisms that underpin anti-black racism vis-à-vis Italian colonial fiction—fictions that give life to the deceit that Italy is colorblind. It focuses attention on the work of Orio Vergani (1898-1960) who was one of the most prolific documentarians of Italian East Africa. His reportage established a vast image repository of exoticized, black bodies that reinforced prevailing colonial stereotypes about Africa in the Italian cultural imagination during the early-20 th century. Yet his novel, Io, povero negro (1929)—claimed to be Italy's first with a black protagonist—was written before Vergani ever set foot in Africa. The text presents a formulation of blackness conceived of obliquely, in the absence of Italy, and belonging to an elsewhere, that is, between an unnamed colony in Africa, France, and the United States. In so doing, it advances a rhetoric of race defined by absence, blockage, and deflection that was conceived transnationally, which, in turn, helps to set the conditions for both the denial and naturalization of racism in Italy today.

  PublisherDOI

• Pandemic Postscript

  2022-11-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The COVID-19 pandemic reshuffled understandings of subjectivity linked to tourism, migration, and exile. Almost overnight, for instance, tourists were reclassified as disease carriers and migrants as essential workers. This postscript explores three interrelated repercussions of the pandemic: the transformation of immobility into a locus of privilege; the intensification of biopolitics vis à vis the movements of tourists, migrants, and exiles; and the emergence of new pandemic imaginaries, often driven by mis- and disinformation, and their potential for making meaning and re-shaping worldviews. Ranging in discussion from (im)mobility-generated inequality to vaccine tourism, from life-and-death quandaries faced when visiting friends and relatives to viral metaphors describing migrants, the postscript concludes by asking how the pandemic might generate new ways of imagining, and thus belonging, centered on communal rather than categorical bounds.

  PublisherDOI

• Author’s Response to Empire’s Mobius Strip Forum

  Critical Ethnic Studies · 2021-07-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On Italian mobilities and ecological fretwork

  Modern Italy · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Geography

  This invited commentary explores the ecological fretwork binding people and nature, and, specifically, how Italy and Italianness serve as critical frames for envisioning an environmental history of migration. It examines how each contribution in this special issue adds rigorous archival research to the growing body of academic literature on Italy and the environmental humanities. It also comments on the future research directions, which are connected to this emerging history. Situating these contributions in the wider context of climate change and planetary transformation, this article illuminates how mobilities, understood as an Italian phenomenon, have shaped the globe on a scale previously unknown.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prefatory Note: Borderless Italy in the Age of the Coronavirus

  California Italian Studies · 2020-04-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

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  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction to Volume 9, Issue 1: Italia senza frontiere/Borderless Italy

  California Italian Studies · 2020-04-22 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  *

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Black spaces: African diaspora in Italy

  Social & Cultural Geography · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy makes visible what is invisible, that is, how space becomes racialized in the practice of everyday life in contemporary Italy. Heather Merrill’s exploration ...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 1. The Island

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Notes on Rhetoric and Repetition in Tourism

  2019-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claudio Fogu

  University of California System

  2 shared

• Laura E. Ruberto

  Berkeley City College

  2 shared

• Christopher Endy

  California State University Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Waleed Hazbun

  University of Alabama

  1 shared

• Shelley Baranowski

  University of Akron

  1 shared

• Trevor M. Simmons

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• Eric G. E. Zuelow

  University of New England

  1 shared

• Gordon Pirie

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2019 AAIS Book Prize (20th and 21st century)