Stephanie Malia Hom

Stephanie Malia Hom is an Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (2015).

Stephanie Malia Hom will be working on a book project tracing the unexplored relationship between slavery and colonialism in Italy. Focusing on Genoa, it investigates large-scale operations of slave ransom and redemption across the Mediterranean, and asks how this control over movement served as a precedent for the civilizing mission of Italy’s imperialist enterprise. It explores how operations of salvation—rescuing slaves, civilizing natives—connect slavery and colonialism vis-à-vis mobility.