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Dr. Stephanie Malia Hom is currently Assistant Professor of Italian, specializing in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Italian literature and culture. Trained in literary criticism and cultural anthropology, her research utilizes interdisciplinary methodologies to explore the relationships between modern mass tourism and Italian national identity.

She is the author of several articles on such wide-ranging topics as tourist narratives and constructions of subjectivity, the vocabularies of nationalism in the work of Ippolito Nievo, female representations in fascist tourism propaganda, and the linkages between identity and mobility in Italian immigrant literature. Professor Hom is currently at work on two book projects. Her first book, Destination Italy: Tourism, Nation, Place, examines the historical phenomenon of mass tourism and how it has shaped the modern Italian nation-state since the mid-nineteenth century. It argues that Italy’s identity as a modern nation was intimately bound up with its identity as a destination. The book traces the evolution of Italy-as-destination—starting with the rhetorical constructions of “Italy” present in guidebooks, to their implementation in tourist practices, and finally, their physical incarnations as simulacra outside the peninsula, creating a globalized Italy without Italians separate from national territory. Her second book, tentatively titled, Know Your Colony! Travel Writing, Colonial Tourism, and Italian Empire, traces the evolution of Italian colonial travel writing and the material practices of tourism between the Mediterranean (Rhodes, Libya) and East Africa (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia).

Her teaching interests include modern Italian literature and culture; travel writing; Italian anthropology and folklore; Italian theories of post/modernity; the Risorgimento; Italian fascism; neorealism in literature and cinema; the Italian colonial experience; and theories of space/place.

Professor Hom received her MA and PhD in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, a Diploma di lingua e cultura italiana from the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, and a BA with honors in International Relations from Brown University.