Valerie McGuire is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. McGuire’s research and teaching interests center on the transnational, colonial, and postcolonial processes that have defined modern Italian culture, both within the peninsula and among its collectivities abroad. Her first book, Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945 (Liverpool University Press 2020), studied a broader discourse of mediterraneità or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture. She has co-edited a further book of essays, Italian Fascism in Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands, 1923-44 (Routledge 2024), that provides an overview of this understudied Italian “colony” contextualizing it within studies of Italian fascist colonialism and wider debates about imperial systems after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Dr. McGuire is working on her new book project, tentatively entitled, Mediterranean Liquidities and her interests also include crime fiction and film noir and she writes about contemporary crime fiction in the Mediterranean. Valerie McGuire previously held a Fulbright fellowship to Greece, a Max Weber post-doctoral fellowship in History from the European University Institute in Florence, and a Mellon foundation grant for multi-national study of the Mediterranean region from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and an MA and a PhD in Italian from NYU. Dr. McGuire has been a postdoctoral fellow, visiting lecturer and visiting assisting professor at NYU, San Francisco State University, University of California Davis and Berkeley and University of St. Andrews.

With the kind permission of Αρχειοτάξιο/Archeiotaxio - Journal of Greek Contemporary Social History Archives

Special thanks to Ms. Carmen Cohen, Director of the Jewish Community of Rhodes, for granting TEREBINTHOS permission to use the photographic archive of the Rhodes Jewish Museum in this edition