Pamela Ballinger
Fred Cuny Professor of the History of Human Rights
Associate Professor of History
University of Michigan


Although the end of Italian colonialism is often treated as abrupt and definitive as a result of Italy's military defeat in World War II, Italian settlers remained in Libya until their expulsion by the Gaddafi regime in 1970. In this talk, Professor Ballinger examines the experiences of Italians in the rural villages created under fascism, the complicated processes of repatriation, and the ways in which settlers found their mobilities similarly constrained during and after the colonial era. She will argue that reconceptualizing the end of empire in Libya as a “long” decolonization enables us to see marked continuities in the experiences of Italians in rural Libya.

Pamela Ballinger is Fred Cuny Professor of the History of Human Rights and associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile (Princeton University Press, 2003). Her research focuses on refugees and displacement, repatriation, and memory. Her work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Past and Present, Current Anthropology, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and History and Memory.