Italian coffee culture grew up with Fascism: new commercial trade routes linked East African farmers to Northern Italian vendors, establishing transnational commercial imbalances writ in beans and machines. To demonstrate how dictatorial politics transformed caffè culture, this talk will use colonial commodities (coffee beans) to examine how artistic aesthetics (Futurism and Primitivism) shaped industrial design (espresso machines and ceramic cups). At stake in this research is a larger question: How do you study far-right politics without reifying their discriminatory power structures? In other words, how do you research something ugly?

Diana Garvin is the Paul Mellon/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon.

The event will be held in English.