Dr Joseph John Viscomi

Overview

Biography

I am a historian and anthropologist who specializes in the Mediterranean region from the late 18th century until the present. I joined Birkbeck College in 2018. I am the programme director of our MA in European History and I am the Birkbeck director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. At present, I am also a member of the executive committee for the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI) and I serve on the convening committee for the Institute for Historical Research’s Modern Italian History Seminar. 

As a scholar raised in an Italian American enclave in the Philadelphia and South Jersey area (in the US), I am keen to study the history of migration sideways, from perspectives of departure, absence, and entropy. My research and teaching focus on migration, political change, environmental and agricultural transformation, and temporality. I am deeply interested in the potential of cross-disciplinarity to shift how we understand historical and contemporary social problems. I was an affiliated researcher on the ERC project "Crosslocations" at the University of Helsinki (2017-2021) and have held a Faculty Fellowship at NYU's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (2017-18). I have also been a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and was awarded a Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies. In 2016, I completed my PhD in the cross-disciplinary programme in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

Highlights

• New book: Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time (2022), edited with Carl Rommell and published open access with Helsinki University Press. Access pdf and epub versions here. 

• "Burning Landscapes in Calabria," Blog entry about my research on connections between land, archives, and depopulation in Calabria, for the ERC-funded project Emptiness led by Dace Dzenovska (University of Oxford). 

• Ernesto de Martino, Decolonisation, and Translation: A conversation with Dorothy Louise Zinn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and Roberto Dainotto (Duke University) about the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino and his wider historical and intellectual connections since the mid-twentieth century. Chaired by Joseph John Viscomi (Birkbeck, University of London). Recorded on 1 March 2021 as part of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI) 2020-21 conference series, Italian Mediterraneans, 1800-Present.

• "Let's talk Mediterranean," podcast interview organised by Brian Aivars Catlos (University of Colorado Boulder) and Sharon Kinoshita (University of California Santa Cruz) about my article "Pontremoli's Cry: Personhood, Scale, and History in the Eastern Mediterranean" (History and Anthropology, 2020), which was chosen as the Mediterranean Seminar Article of the Month for March 2021. Recorded on 27 April 2021. 

Qualifications

• Fellow, Higher Education Academy, 2021
• PhD , University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2016
• MA, The American University in Cairo, Egypt, 2008
• BSc, Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, 2005

Web profiles

• Humanities Commons

Administrative responsibilities

• Programme Director, MA European History
• Birkbeck Director, Raphael Samuel History Centre

Professional memberships

• Association for the Study of Modern Italy;

  Council for European Studies;

  European Association of Social Anthropologists;

  Mediterranean Studies Association;

  Royal Historical Society (UK);

  Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea (Sissco);

  Society for Italian Historical Studies;

  Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

ORCID

0000-0002-1147-8689

Research

Research overview

My primary research interests are in the history and anthropology of migration, environment, agriculture, materiality, and historical time & temporality. Geographically, I focus on the interconnections between Italian, Southern European, and Mediterranean worlds. Although I am trained and specialized in modern history, I have a growing interest in exploring topics that traverse temporal periods (especially from the mid-18th century to the present). I am also interested in approaches to understanding the past, the history of anthropology in Southern Italy, archival history & archivisation, and the philosophy and anthropology of history.

My book, Migration at the End of Empire: Time and the Politics of Departure between Italy and Egypt (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), examines how Italian subjects in and from Egypt (a population of roughly 55,000 on the eve of WWII) and the political actors around them anticipated, experienced, and remembered their departures from Egypt and arrivals in Italy. It traces the rise, collapse, and afterlives of Italian fascist imperialism and Egypt's decolonization by examining the formation and idea of a political community constituted by ‘Italians of Egypt (italiani d’Egitto)’ in the Mediterranean. On the conceptual level, my book explores how temporal regimes shaped, and continue to shape, geopolitical constellations and experiences of them. My scholarship builds on archival, oral-historical, and ethnographic research and writing which has been supported at different stages by Birkbeck College, a CES-Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies, a Fulbright, and by the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.

In my new research, Depopulating Landscapes, I examine the social, political, and environmental conditions of depopulation in Southern Italy since the late eighteenth century. Whereas the scale of my first book was determined by communities displaced across the Mediterranean, in this research local environs shape the analysis. In other words, I look towards the material places passed over or left behind in the history of migration by concentrating on the relationships between people and land in emptying towns and villages in Mediterranean Europe (i.e. from the landscape of la España vacía to Italy’s aree interne).

Depopulating Landscapes takes seriously the mutual relationship between historical migration and environmental changes, seeking to understand the more-than-human histories of lands, floods, and fires. It focuses primarily on Calabria and the wider Mezzogiorno, but also looks comparatively across Southern European and Mediterranean worlds. It embraces an analytical perspective that traces from the earthquake that rattled parts of Calabria in 1783 to destructive floods in 1950/51 and 1973. Within this broad framework, I am interested in how ideas about the past and the future have changed and been shaped by the intersections of migratory, state-bureaucratic, and environmental processes. I take the small town of Petrizzi (Catanzaro) as a microhistorical prism through which I can examine broader transformations in Southern Italy and Mediterranean Europe. 

I am working on another book that examines histories of the future, departure, family, and the myth of progress. 

Research Centres and Institutes

• Raphael Samuel History Centre

Research clusters and groups

• Mobility, migration
• Environment: urban, rural, global
• Conflict and violence
• Difference, race and inequality
• Materialities and material cultures
• Global history and internationalism

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

3

I am interested in the problems raised by abandoned archives and environmental histories of depopulation in Southern Europe. More broadly, I welcome doctoral and postdoctoral applications on migration, depopulation, agricultural change, environment, and materiality in Italy and the Mediterranean.

Current doctoral researchers

• ALIA ALSAQER

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Sep 2019 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Imperial Encounters: Pirates, Rivalry and British Control over Maritime Networks in the Arabian Gulf 1797-1947

• LUKE SPYROPOULOS

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Greek immigration and Settlement in Southern Africa: a history of capital, race and mobility in the British empire

  Description:

  This is a study of the history of immigration and its governance systems in the late British Empire in Africa and its successor states with a view to understanding the role of emergent racial classification systems in that history. The study will use the example of Greek immigration in the region of southern Africa as a lens with which to study these phenomena. This lens is important because of the non-imperial nature of the migrants, their (waning) racial ambiguity in the period under study and the importance of local settler politics in the region.

Teaching

My modules address political, social, and environmental histories of encounter, exchange, migration and displacement, as well as methodological approaches to studying the past. I teach BA and MA modules on modern Italy, Europe, and the Mediterranean, but I do also run thematic courses. Please send me an email if you would like to see a sample reading list. 

Modules scheduled:

Italy and the World: Migration and Empire, 1815-present (BA, autumn 2023)

The Modern Mediterranean: From colonial sea to environmental crisis? (MA, spring 2024)

Decolonising History/Histories of Decolonisation (with Hilary Sapire) (MA, summer 2024)

 

Modules taught:

Archives & Memory (MA)

Italy and the “New” European Right, 1945-present (MA)

Crossing Borders: Passports, Bodies and the State since 1600 (BA)

Other modules I plan to offer include:

Italy's Southern Question

History in/of the Anthropocene

Democracy and Dictatorship in Southern Europe since 1919

Mediterranean Anthropology: A History

History and the Future: Horizons of Time

Publications

Business and community

Outreach

"Let's talk Mediterranean" podcast interview organised by Brian Aivars Catlos (University of Colorado Boulder) and Sharon Kinoshita (University of California Santa Cruz) about my article "Pontremoli's Cry: Personhood, Scale, and History in the Eastern Mediterranean" (History and Anthropology, 2020), which was chosen as the Mediterranean Seminar Article of the Month for March 2021. Recorded on 27 April 2021. 

Ernesto de Martino, Decolonisation, and Translation: A conversation with Dorothy Louise Zinn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and Roberto Dainotto (Duke University). Chaired by Joseph John Viscomi (Birkbeck, University of London). Recorded on 1 March 2021 as part of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI) 2020-21 conference series, Italian Mediterraneans.