Ph.D., Romance Studies, 2016 - Cornell University                                                    

A.B., Romance Studies, 2006 - Harvard University

Book

Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work. Forthcoming with University of Toronto Press (Fall 2021).

Articles

“Reproductive Healthcare from Fascism to Forza Nuova.” Forthcoming with Signs (Spring 2021).

“Militarizing Monopoly: Game Designs for Wartime.” Forthcoming with Design Issues (Spring 2021).  

“Black Markets: The Production of Fascist Racism in East African Marketplace Newsreels.” Forthcoming with Journal of Modern European History (Winter 2021).

“Constructing Race through Commercial Space: Merkato Ketema under Fascist Urban Planning.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies. 25.2 (2020): 118-148. 

“Singing Truth to Power: Melodic Resistance and Bodily Revolt in Italy’s Rice Fields.” Annali d’Italianistica, special edition “Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy.” Eds. Jo Ann Cavallo and Carlo Lottieri. 34 (2016): 371-398. (Winner of the 2017 Russo and Linkon Award for Best Published Article for Academic Audiences, Working-Class Studies Association.)

“Taylorist Breastfeeding in Rationalist Clinics: Constructing Industrial Motherhood in Fascist Italy.” Critical Inquiry. 41 (2015): 655-674.

Essays in Edited Volumes

“Interracial Wetnursing in Italian East Africa.” Forthcoming with The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism.  Eds. Chelsea Schields and Dagmar Herzog.  New York: Forthcoming with Routedge (Winter 2021).

“Producing Consumers: Gendering Italy through Food Advertisements.” In Representing Italy through Food.  Eds. Peter Naccarato, Ken Albala, and Zachary Nowak.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2016: 143-161. 

“Communicative Blogging for Student Engagement and Blended Literacy.”  In Doing Research to Improve Teaching and Learning: A Guide for College and University Faculty. Ed. Kimberly Williams.  New York: Routledge, 2015: 103-106.

Conference Proceedings

“Autarchic by Design: Aesthetics and Politics of Kitchenware.”  In Food and Material Culture: Proceedings of the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. London: Prospect Books, 2013: 11-19. 

Translations

Antonio Negri, “To the Origins of Biopolitics. A Seminar” (“Alle origini del biopolitico”). In Biopower: Foucault and Beyond.  Eds. Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016: 48-64.

Roberto Esposito, “The Person and Human Life”  (“Persona e vita umana”). In Theory after “Theory.”   Eds. Derek Attridge and Jane Elliott. Co-trans. Thomas Kelso. New York: Routledge, 2011: 205-219.                                

Travel Guide                 

Let’s Go: Spain and Portugal 2006. Ed. Diana Garvin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

Diana's current project, “Feeding Fascism,” examines the history of everyday life across Fascist Italy and the Horn of Africa (modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia) through decolonial methodology and feminist approaches to the archive.  Specifically, she uses food as a lens to examine daily negotiations of power, demonstrating how women’s work to feed their families speaks to broader questions of gendered forms of labor, the social construction of race and racism, and what is at stake in the struggle for nourishment and flavor both in multi-ethnic Italy and across the global south.  Fellowships from Oxford and Cornell University, the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum and Research Center, the CLIR Mellon Foundation, and the Julia Child Foundation, as well as grants from FLAS, AAUW, NWSA, and AFS, have supported her research at over thirty international archives, libraries, and museums.

Diana spent the 2017-2018 academic year at the American Academy in Rome as the Rome Prize winner in Modern Italian Studies to research, “The Bean in the Machine: Coffee and Caffè Culture under Italian Fascism.” This second project investigates the history of coffee culture across three continents during the Fascist ventennio (1922-1945.)  By using the novel framework of coffee, from the bean in the field to the machine in the caffè, Diana connects interwar histories that previously been explored independently.  The narrative carries the reader from Roman and Eritrean caffès to Brazilian and Ethiopian coffee plantations to underscore how coffee growing and and drinking changed under Fascism. Ultimately, this trajectory broadens the way that we understand how food and farming became politicized during the Fascist period.  By untangling the interwar trade of beans and bodies between Italy, Brazil, and East Africa, this project brings to light an untold story of caffeinated imperial aggression and resistance. 

(Selected; for full list please see CV)

Getty Research Library Grant, 2020

UO Presidential Fellow in Humanistic Studies, 2019-2020

Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies, American Academy of Rome, 2017-2018

Columbia University Postdoctoral Fellowship, Italian Academy (Honor Declined), 2017

Wolfsonian-FIU Research Fellowship, 2016

CLIR Mellon Research Fellowship, 2015 – 2016 

AAUW American Fellowship (Honor Declined), 2015

Julia Child Foundation Scholarship, 2014

Oxford University Cherwell Studentship, 2013

AFS Sue Samuelson Foodways Award, 2013

FLAS Fellowship, 2011