 Contact CCT
 Advertise with CCT |
 University  College  Alumni Home |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
AROUND THE QUADS5 Minutes With … Victoria de Grazia
History professor Victoria de Grazia began teaching at Columbia in 1993, having previously taught at Rutgers. A Chicago native, de Grazia earned her B.A. at Smith College and Ph.D. in history at Columbia. CCT caught up with her during the summer to find out more. Q: What was it like returning to Columbia? A: The huge surprise was how little it had changed from 1976 to 1993. Then big changes began to occur. Today, the department is completely different from when I came — it was at its best in the ’70s, and is at its best in 2005. Q: What classes are you teaching this fall? A: I’m teaching “Contemporary Civilization” — the second half — and an undergraduate seminar, “Globalizing American Consumer Culture.” Students will develop research projects and use documents from other cultures to understand how others understand American culture. Q: What is your new book, Irresistible Empire, about? A: How American consumer culture reached out to Europe, and globalization passing through 20th century Europe. Q: What led you to become an expert on mass and consumer cultures, gender and family politics in contemporary Western Europe? A: I was very interested in hard politics, but at some point I thought, ‘How do authoritarian regimes persuade people to go along?’ So I began to study Italian fascism and began to see a very modern consumer culture. That was my path to thinking about consumer culture developing people into bad regimes, and all societies … In some ways, it made me less moralistic about it. Not American culture is bad, but how does it work? How do people decide what a good society is based on decisions made in the marketplace? Q: What is the last book you read for fun? A: The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk, about the battle for empire in central Asia. Q: Where is your favorite place to have lunch near CC? A: The Avery/Fayerweather basement café, because I like to visit the architects. Q: Coffee or tea? A: I’m an espresso drinker: double, and never Starbucks. Q: What is your favorite class to teach? A: “Europe Since 1945,” an undergraduate course. When I started teaching that course, it ended in 1968; now it has to end in 2005. We used to talk about Europe at war while the U.S. was at peace. The big question now is, what are themes of Europe at peace? Q: What’s new in the history department? A: The department has taken the important initiative of globalizing its program. Students are excited about connecting with the rest of the world. It’s interesting shifting from studying nation-states to a wider perspective, studying everything: labor, women’s networks … So my subject, Europe, is gradually occupying a different place than in the past. Our students are different than in the past as well, from all over the states, immigrants and from abroad. Q: Where do you live? A: 106th Street, which used to be outside the Columbia empire … no longer. Q: Do you have any pets? A: A mini-Dachshund named Lily. She is well-traveled; she got her EU passport last week. Q: What is your favorite place in the world? A: All said and done, it’s Italy … Tuscany, Arezzo, the most beautiful and familiar is a small town where my daughter, Livia, was raised. Q: If you were not teaching at CC, what would you most likely be doing? A: I would love to be a marine biologist. I love nature, love swimming. It would be exciting to be an explorer of the sea. Interview and photo:
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
