SIHS Article Prize Honorable Mention for Modern Italian History: Matilde Cazzola

The Society for Italian Historical Studies is pleased to award honorable mention to Matilde Cazzola for her article “The Strange Case of Dr. Giustiniani and Mr. Hirsch: The Incomplete History of an Imposture, 1790s-1855,” published in Quaderni Storici in 2023. We congratulate Cazzola for her tour-de-force article, which takes the reader on a breathtaking journey across three continents, to uncover the secret life of an Anglican missionary who traveled under many names, and many identities. Cazzola shows us that reality is not always what it seems: the Hungarian-Jewish Jakab Szarvas, the Rome-residing Catholic Giacobbe Hirsch, and the Australian-based Anglican Louis Giustiniani were not three different people, but one and the same man, who criss-crossed countries, converted and reconverted to new religions, and refashioned his identity again and again. In the process, Cazzola not only sheds light on what it meant to be a name-changing, rule-defying, border-crosser in the early 19th century; she also uncovers the fascinating tale of a Jewish-Catholic-Anglical man who was the first European to demand that indigenous prisoners in Western Australia be treated as human beings, and provided with legal representation. Cazzola takes us behind the scenes, piecing together the portrait of this evasive figure through archives scattered in nine countries and in six languages. In the process, she provides us with a new perspective on the history of imperialism, the history of religious conversion, and the history of Italy in the wider world.