Charles Leavitt, an associate professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize.

Bestowed by the American Academy in Rome, the prize equips artists and scholars with resources to expand their work by exploring and creating in the Italian capital. Leavitt is one of the 35 fellows in the arts, humanities, and sciences chosen to spend the 2025-26 academic year at the academy.

“Rome is an important research hub,” said Theodore J. Cachey Jr., the Pizzo Family Chair in Dante Studies and Ravarino Family Director of Italian and Dante Studies. “Leavitt’s fellowship at the American Academy will allow him to collaborate with leading scholars in Italy and beyond.”

Leavitt’s recent research explores the experience of occupation, particularly the Italian response to the American occupation after World War II in Tombolo, a pine grove on the coast of Tuscany.

“Tombolo took on an outsized importance for Italians at the time because it was largely manned by African American soldiers, and many Italians had never seen a Black person before,” Leavitt said. “They found the experience of getting to know these Black soldiers as being transformational for their society.”

Many Italian writers, poets, and filmmakers created art trying to make sense of their experiences. Leavitt, who holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, studies these works spanning media and genre as a way of rethinking a cultural encounter between Americans and Italians.

“By focusing on how the arts were powerful in a specific Italian moment, we actually begin to think about how the arts might be significant for our own time and for our own experiences,” he said.

Leavitt, the associate director of the Center for Italian Studies and director of graduate studies for Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, plans to continue his research in Rome on this unique moment in Italian and American history by completing a monograph tentatively titled “The War Between Black and White: Racial Conflict in American-Occupied Italy.” The project investigates a series of violent clashes between the U.S. Armed Forces and the African American inhabitants of Tombolo between 1945 and 1948.

The book will, for the first time, identify Tombolo as the site of an African American freedom struggle, demonstrating how postwar Italy played a pivotal role in the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. Although this history has been largely forgotten, Leavitt argues that the tragic events of Tombolo continue to haunt contemporary society, and he hopes the book will empower readers to confront and comprehend this important time in Italian and American history.

“Leavitt’s innovative work highlights significant transnational connections and will make a valuable contribution to the field,” said Guido Bonsaver, professor of Italian cultural history at the University of Oxford. “This interdisciplinary research project gives a much-needed account of social, racial, and gender dynamics that for too long have been overlooked in the scholarship.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on May 05, 2025.