Angelo Caglioti
· Assistant Professor, Barnard CollegeVerifiedColumbia University · History
Active 2011–2024
About
Angelo Caglioti is an Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College. He specializes in Late Modern European History, Environmental History, and the History of Science. His academic role is situated within the History Department, and he holds office hours on Mondays from 10 AM to 12 PM at 801 Milstein Center. His contact email is acagliot@barnard.edu, and his phone number is 212-853-8111.
Research topics
- Political Science
- History
- Sociology
- Humanities
- Art
- Computer Science
- Law
- Aesthetics
- Economic history
- Ethnology
- Environmental ethics
- Art history
- Development economics
- Philosophy
- Ancient history
- Geography
- World Wide Web
- Library science
- Archaeology
Selected publications
Past & Present · 2024
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- History
- Political Science
ABSTRACT This article places the origins of Italian settler colonialism and its defeat in the battle of Adwa (1896) in the global perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Italians’ introduction of rinderpest in Eritrea in the wake of an El Niño-related drought triggered “the Great African Rinderpest Panzootic” and the “Great Ethiopian Famine”. The mixture of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian projects explains Italy’s defeat in the battle of Adwa. Building on the methodology of environmental historians and scholars in Science and Technology Studies, this article shifts focus from the power of the state to the techno-politics of colonialism in its impact on natural environments and African communities through the lens of the cultural production of ignorance.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Humanities
- History
- Philosophy
Austrian History Yearbook · 2023-12-14
article1st authorCorrespondingAn abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Panel Two: Climate Change and Anthropocene, March 19, 2021
Environmental discourses in science education · 2023-01-01
book-chapterOpen access1st authorAbstract In this panel discussion, Angelo Caglioti (History), Jonathan Snow (Biology), Andrew Crowther (Chemistry), and María S. Rivera Maulucci (Education) discuss the Anthropocene, climate change, and sustainability, and how they teach about these ideas in courses in their respective disciplines.
Modern Italy · 2023-08-02
article1st authorCorrespondingHoly War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy's Crusade Against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church by Ian Campbell, London, Hurst, 2021, xxxi + 449 pp., £30 (hardback), ISBN 9781787384774 - Volume 29 Issue 2
Science and Fascism, or Fascist Science?
2022-01-17 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingWhile historians of Germany have made Nazi science an essential aspect of Hitler's regime, Italian historians have always written about science and Fascism as two separate entities. This perspective confirms the assumption that good science, as a pure intellectual enterprise, can exist and function properly only in liberal-democratic regimes. Did science work differently under Fascism? In short, was there a “Fascist science”? To answer these questions, the essay aims at crossing the traditional boundary between political histories of Fascism and histories of science under the regime. Building on recent scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the essay investigates the institutional mechanisms and power struggles of Fascist science by using the example of Italian meteorology. The analysis of the Italian Meteorological Society and the Aeronautical Meteorological Service as social and scientific networks at once is a key test of Fascism's rhetoric claiming perfect coordination between Italian science, society and the regime, as they failed to harmonize Italy's competing meteorological services in the 1930s. In short, the essay argues that Fascist science is key to understand the successes and limits of Fascism as modernization project.
E<scp>lizabeth</scp> W. G<scp>iorgis</scp>. <i>Modernist Art in Ethiopia</i>.
The American Historical Review · 2021-11-23
article1st authorCorrespondingModernist Art in Ethiopia is more than an important addition to the field of African art history. Rather, the book is a cultural and intellectual history of Ethiopia in the twentieth century through the perspective of modern art. The argument of the book is that “Ethiopian modernity and modernism are constitutive of the larger political and ideological history of modernity,” which Giorgis—building on the work of the literary critic Walter Mignolo—sees as deeply embedded with coloniality and the broader cultural legacy of colonialism (4). The fundamental inquiry of Modernist Art in Ethiopia is, What did “modernity” mean to artists and intellectuals from an African country that prides itself on never having been colonized? In order to address this question, Giorgis challenges the traditional narrative—or orthodoxy, in the author’s words—of Ethiopian exceptionalism vis-à-vis the experience of colonialism in the rest of the African continent. Ethiopian exceptionalism positions the country in a...
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2020 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Art history
June 01 2020 The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society between Tradition and Modernity The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society between Tradition and Modernity. By DarioGaggio (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2016) 301 pp. $110.00 cloth $31.99 paper Angelo Matteo Caglioti Angelo Matteo Caglioti American Academy in Rome Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Angelo Matteo Caglioti American Academy in Rome Online Issn: 1530-9169 Print Issn: 0022-1953 © 2020 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2020by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2020) 51 (1): 147–149. https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01533 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Angelo Matteo Caglioti; The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society between Tradition and Modernity. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2020; 51 (1): 147–149. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01533 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search What makes a beautiful landscape? The Shaping of Tuscany explains how the Tuscan countryside became an icon of timeless beauty and a popular tourist destination known for its rolling hills, traditional farmhouses, and graceful vineyards that seem to have graced the region since the Renaissance. Yet the argument of the book is that both the natural features of Tuscan agriculture and the cultural representation of Tuscany as an immutable landscape are actually the product of recent social conflict, hard labor, and a huge amount of cultural work. In short, Tuscany is beautiful not because its traditional landscape was preserved intact over time but because Tuscans struggled to produce a legible space in the face of dramatic historical transformations. Rather than just... © 2020 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2020by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. You do not currently have access to this content.
Relocating Meteorology: Special issue of History of Meteorology
2017-01-01
articleSenior authorEuropean History Quarterly · 2017-07-01 · 11 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingThis article traces the development of Italian eugenics and scientific racism from their origins in nineteenth-century positivist anthropology to the 1938 Manifesto of Racial Scientists. I follow the biographical trajectory of the Sicilian racial thinker Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), the last member of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist school, a founding father of Italian eugenics and a prominent statistician throughout the fascist regime. I argue that the peculiarity of the Italian path to eugenics was its ‘internal orientalism’, caused by the poverty and perceived backwardness of the Italian South. Blending Niceforo’s biography with his ideas, I chart the social and intellectual history of Italian scientific racism from the transformation of Lombroso’s school to the fascist ‘Aryanization’ of Italians.
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Andrew Crowther
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- 1 shared
Jonathan W. Snow
Barnard College
- 1 shared
María S. Rivera Maulucci
- 1 shared
Martin Mahony
University of East Anglia
- 1 shared
Yuval Dinoor
Barnard College
- 1 shared
Aastha Jain
Awards & honors
- Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Flo…
- Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment an…
- Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome
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