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Victoria de Grazia

Professor Victoria de Grazia Is Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University. She was born in Chicago, grew up crisscrossing the continental U.S. until the family settled in Princeton, N.J., and now has dual U.S. and Italian citizenship. She currently lives between New York City and Sarteano, Province of Siena.

She received her BA magna cum laude from Smith College in 1968, pursued advanced studies in history at the University of Florence, and was awarded her PhD with distinction from Columbia University in 1976. She taught at Rutgers University (1976-1993) and Lehman College (1974-1976) before joining the Columbia History Department in 1994. She directed Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender from 1994 to 1996 and its European Institute from 2008 to 2015.

Her intellectual and scholarly interests lie in the study of power, specifically, the intersection of force and persuasion or hard and soft power, and how these mesh differently under liberal and authoritarian systems of rule. Her books and articles on fascist rule, consumer societies, and American empire have won awards and been widely reviewed and translated. Her most recent book, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality (Harvard Belknap Press; Italian ed. Einaudi), comes out this summer, and Soft Power Internationalism, 1990-2020, with Burcu Baykurt (Columbia University Press) will come out next spring, 2021.

A founding member of the Radical History Review Collective (1974), she had served on the board of editors of numerous professional journals, including the Journal of Modern Italy, Genèses, Contemporary European History, and the Journal of Consumer Culture. From 1997 to 2002, she was the National Chair of the Council for European Studies. She has taught at the European Institute and the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, lectured in China, Japan, Canada, Cuba, and Brazil, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.