Professor Barbara Spackman‘s book Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands, published by Liverpool University Press in July 2017, has recently won two prizes:

The 2017 American Association for Italian Studies Prize for the Best Book in the category of Renaissance, 18th and 19th Centuries, and

The 2017 Modern Language Association Howard R. Marraro Prize Honorable Mention (pictured, photo credit Edward Savaria, Jr.).

The committee’s citation for Spackman’s book reads:

Barbara Spackman’s contribution to the archives of Italian and orientalist studies illuminates a heretofore little-known cluster of authors and cultural phenomena that invites us to rethink Italian modernity transhistorically. The lives of these accidental orientalists resonate profoundly as points of departure from which to reflect on Italy’s diasporic past and evolving diasporic present and future. Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands has opened a new chapter in the migration and movement of Italians in the Mediterranean basin across linguistic, gender, and religious boundaries. These affective adaptations and reactions contribute to the twenty-first-century cultural negotiations that inform narratives of identity, displacement, destabilization, and reconsolidation.