Mia Fuller is the incoming Director of the Institute of European Studies, effective January 1, 2025. Fuller is the Gladyce Arata Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies and also served as Department Chair of Italian Studies from 2019-2024. She continues as Director for the Program for the Study of Italy at IES, a position she began in 2016. Mia Fuller is a cultural anthropologist and urban-architectural historian whose research concerns the interplays of physical space with political power. Combining fieldwork with archival and bibliographic research, she has published extensively on architecture and city planning in the Italian colonies, winning an International Planning History Society book prize in (2008) for Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism .She is currently completing a revised edition (in Italian) of this book, as well as a new book titled Monuments and Mussolini: A Cultural History of Fascist Memory.
She continues to write on Libya and the legacies of Italian colonialism there (for example: https://www.fairobserver.com/region/middle_east_north_africa/libyan-genocide-20- todays-conflict-light-colonial-past/). She has also written about how Eritrea capitalizes on the built environment Italians left behind (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mb1z7f8#main), and on the endurance of memories of fascism, World War II, and Mussolini (as in this article: https://www.politika.io/fr/notice/equivocal-mussolinis).
Fuller’s research has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the National Science Foundation; she has received grants from the American Institute of Maghrib Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Barbieri Research Fund, the École Française de Rome, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Université-Paris Est Créteil, and the Wolfsonian-Florida International University.
