Bianca Gaudenzi

Dr Bianca Gaudenzi

BA MA MPhil PhD

Bianca is an Assistant Professor in Modern European History at the Free University of Bozen, a Bye-Fellow at Wolfson College, and a Visiting Scholar at the GHI Rome. Her research focuses on fascist consumer culture and the restitution of looted artefacts since 1945.

Bianca Gaudenzi

Bianca read modern languages and history at the University of Florence and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, followed by an MPhil in Modern European History and a PhD in History at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge in 2011.

She was a Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London between 2009 and 2010, was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge (2011-2014), a Marie Skłodowska Curie-ZIF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Konstanz (2015-1017) and a Research Group Leader position (Nachwuchsgruppenleiterin, Habilitationsstelle) at the University of Konstanz (2018-2024). During this time, she successfully applied for a three-year grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG, Eigene Stelle) to fund her project on 'The Restitution of Looted Cultural Property in Austria, Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1998', which she carried out as a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome (2018-2022).

Since 2021 Bianca has been acting as an expert for the ‘Working Group for the study and research on cultural property taken from the Jews in Italy between 1938 and 1945 as a result of the Racial Laws’ of the Italian Ministry of Culture and is a member of the Royal Historical Society, the German History Society and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy.

Bianca’s research interests lie in the cultural and social history of 20th-century Europe, Germany, Italy and Austria in primis, focusing primarily on two main fields of research:

1) The history of consumer culture during the Fascist and Nazi regimes - starting with the role played by advertising professionals in fostering consensus by projecting the illusion of a future Fascist consumer society (the subject of her first two books, Comprare per credere, 2016, and Fascismi in vetrina, 2023). More recently she also embarked on a project that analyses the history of colonial consumption in 20th-century Italy, comparing the consumption of the so-called ‘colonial’ goods in the Italian peninsula with the consumption practices, places and objects in the colonial space, especially in Libya.

2) The politics of restitution of fascist-looted cultural property in Germany, Italy, and Austria since 1945, comparing the prompt restoration of state-owned collections after the Second World War with the extremely strenuous quest for restitution to Jewish citizens. The project devotes particular attention to the so-called ‘sitting-room art’, rather than the very few prominent artworks which have gathered so much attention in the past, as a way of showing how cultural heritage helped shape the identity, taste, and social status of the educated middle classes. This field of research has been developed in both transnational and global perspectives, with particular attention to colonial-era looted artefacts, as explored in her co-edited Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary History (2017) and her Special Issue of The material legacies of Italian colonialism with QFIAB, Journal of the GHI Rome (2024). Public outreach activities included two major TV programmes for Italian audiences, teacher training activities with the MEIS (Museum of Italian Jewry and Shoah) and on-site tours of Rome’s Jewish quarter.

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