Name: Joe Karisny
Year in program: 7
ABD Y/N: Yes
Primary supervisor: Ronen Steinberg
Major field: Modern Europe
Minor fields: Food and Alcohol; Comparative Empire
Trained in the broader field of Modern Europe, my research focuses on the political history of France and Italy in the interwar years. My dissertation—“Food Politics for Export: Italian Fascism and French Political Life”—contributes to recent literature on transnational fascism and food politics. To complicate the historiography on fascism in France, it contends that the political imaginary of Mussolini’s regime acted as “a revolutionary script” for a broad cast of French actors. From political movements like the Faisceau to Latinist organizations and technocrats, it examines how Franco-Italo exchange imported the principles of Italian Fascism to France. Here I employ food politics as a mediator between the imagined ideals and material concerns of the fascist script. By examining how ideological constructs looped into disciplines like nutrition, the dissertation explores how food embodied and embedded fascist ideas in the material world—how historical actors attempted to put theory into practice.