Morale and the Italian Army During the First World War: Professor Vanda Wilcox
Professor Vanda Wilcox
John Cabot University professor Vanda Wilcox recently published Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War with Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Wilcox holds a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on the military, cultural and social history of the First World War in Italy, as well as the memory and commemoration of the two World Wars. She is also interested in sports history, particularly Italian football culture. Her current research focuses on the Italo-Turkish war (1911-12) and on the colonial and imperial dimensions of Italian participation in the First World War.
At John Cabot University, Professor Wilcox teaches courses in European and Italian history in the nineteenth and twentieth century as well as on the World Wars, the history of imperialism, memory and popular culture, and modern sports history.
From the publisher’s website:
Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy’s notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army’s demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.
Learn more about the Department of History and Humanities at John Cabot University.
