Oral history interview with Victoria de Grazia, 2015

Biographical Note

Victoria de Grazia is Professor History at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1993, and served as the Director of IRWAG from 1994-1996. As Director, she engaged the Institute on topics of nationalism and worked to increase the community and camaraderie between faculty and graduate students. Her research has dealt with contemporary relations and exchanges between Europe and the United States, including the ways national and family politics shape women's lives. Before becoming a professor at Columbia University, she taught at Lehman College of the City of New York (1974-1976) and at Rutgers University (1976-1993). While a graduate student in History at Columbia (1970-1976), she was a member of the founding collective of the Radical History Review

Scope and Contents

In the first session of this interview, De Grazia discusses her early academic experiences at Smith College as an undergraduate and her subsequent enrollment in Columbia's Graduate History program. She characterizes and explains her involvement with the Radical History Review. De Grazia discusses her time teaching European History at Lehman College and Rutgers University in the late 1970s. De Grazia cites the birth of her child in Italy as a turning point for her scholarship, as it made clear the prevalence of fascist practices surrounding femininity in Italy that inspired her first book, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945. De Grazia describes her involvement in the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Empowered to pursue new projects, De Grazia began studying issues of consumption and gender with Michael Taussig and Ina Merkel, which resulted in her 1996 volume entitled The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. De Grazia describes the camaraderie of faculty and the union presence at Rutgers. In 1994, De Grazia joined Columbia's faculty and she offers an organizational comparison between Rutgers University and Columbia University. Finally, De Grazia discusses the development and financial support of IRWGS in the late 1990s. In session two of the interview, De Grazia focuses on the development of IRWGS, from the early years of its creation into present day. De Grazia describes the struggle for departmental funding and the tenure in IRWGS, naming Gayatri Spivak as an early faculty advocate. De Grazia recalls the importance of solidarity, and describes a petition regarding Nadia Abu El-Haj. De Grazia also discusses the precarious position of junior faculty within IRWGS, and the formation of Q Fac to address these issues. De Grazia concludes with a discussion of the centrality of Barnard College to the success of IRWGS and the dynamism of gender and sexuality studies. In the final session of De Grazia's interview, she describes her global approach to women's studies. De Grazia goes on to describe the 'old left' attitude of the history department, the way Lila Abu-Lughod's work informed hers, and organizing faculty against the invasion of Iraq. De Grazia concludes with a discussion of her interaction with student life and her present role as Director of the European Institute

Subjects

• Barnard College.
• College teachers--Interviews.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• De Grazia, Victoria--Interviews.
• Dziedzic, Sarah, interviewer.
• Feminism and higher education--United States.
• Feminist theory.
• Gay and lesbian studies--United States.
• Interviews.
• Motherhood.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Rutgers University.
• Women's studies.
• Women--Italy--History--20th century.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015