Camilla Hawthorne, STS Designated Emphasis student at Berkeley, has been selected as a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow for her project entitled, “There Are No Black Italians? National Belonging and the Nuovi Italiani.” This highly competitive fellowship grants her three full years of support for her PhD dissertation work. The awards are made to “individuals who, in the judgment of the review panels, have demonstrated superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.”

Camilla’s project focuses on questions of race, national identity, and citizenship in contemporary Italy. She studies the various ways in which the children of African immigrants in Italy engage with the question of whether it is possible to be both Black and Italian. She is particularly interested in media and circulation–specifically, how the diasporic subjectivity of Black youth in Italy is increasingly mediated by the Internet and social networking sites.

More information on the fellowship can be found here.