Claudio Fogu moved to Los Angeles in 1983 to study film at UCLA and later pursued a Ph.D. in History. He taught from 1995 to 2000 at The Ohio State University (OSU) and then at the University of Southern California (USC) from 2000 to 2004. Since moving to University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2005, he has been an Associate Professor of Italian Studies. He teaches courses on Italian cultural history and memory, with an emphasis on film and visual culture. He is the author of two monographs, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web. Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (2020), and The Historic Imaginary. Politics of History in Fascist Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2003). He has co-edited The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke UP, 2006), Metahistory’s Fortieth Anniversary (Storia e Storiografia, 2015), and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard UP, 2016), and published widely in The Journal of Contemporary History (1996), Representations (1997), History and Theory (2003 and 2009), Storiografia (2013), and The Journal of Modern European History (2014). He is also a co-founder of two digital journals: California Italian Studies (CIS), of which he co-edited two issues (“Italy in The Mediterranean,” 2010; “Italia senza frontiere,” 2020) and ZapruderWorld, of which he will co-edit the fourth volume on “Performing Race.” Prof. Fogu joins his passion for scholarship to civic and social engagement. He is co-founder and current board member of The Azzurra, a foundation dedicated to advancing the cause of human dignity and personal expression through cultural exchange between Italy and Southern California. He has been Vice-President of the Comitato Italiani all’Estero (ComItEs) of Los Angeles (2014-2020), Vice-President of the Consortium of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), and President of the UCSB Faculty Association (SBFA, 2017-2021), and the consortium of California chapters of the American Association of University Professors (CA-AAUP, 2018-2020). In 2016 he founded the Premio Mare, an annual prize given to the best fiction and non-fiction books published in Italy on the theme of maritime life. Since last year he has been joined by writer Alessandro Baricco in transforming the prize into a more articulated festival of maritime culture called MARetica.