Abstract:
The chapter is part of Vita Zalar's ongoing dissertation project, The Conceptual History of Gypsiness: Habsburg and Post-Habsburg Perspectives, 1860-1940, which presents a materialist reading of imperial and post-imperial modes of structural racism against Roma and Sinti in the successive multinational states of Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It draws on research in the post-Habsburg, post-Yugoslav, and Swiss state archives, the League of Nations archives, and published sources ranging from governmental to popular and scholarly knowledge production about Roma. The dissertation pursues three main lines of inquiry. First, how did "Gypsyism" oscillate as a multifaceted concept within the race-class-nation triangle? Second, what was the political economy of this conceptual oscillation? Third, what were the lived experiences of Roma and Sinti during this historical conjuncture, and what gaps for their agency were left in the fabric of structural racism?

Vita Zalar is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research focuses on Habsburg and post-Habsburg Central and Southeastern Europe, with a special emphasis on the history of Roma and Sinti in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She combines social and cultural history, history of ideas, history of imperialism and colonialism, and historical materialism.
Contact: vita.zalar@gmail.com

Jennifer Illuzzi is Associate Professor of History at Providence College. She focuses on the intersections of institutional history and diasporic populations, particularly Romani populations in Europe. She studies modern German and Italian history, with an emphasis on social and political history, especially gender history, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her publications include "Stories of a Life Together" in Erreffe 74 (2019), "Reimagining Colony and Metropole: Images of Italy and Libya during the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912" in Gender and History 30 (2018), and Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861-1914: Lives Outside the Law (2014).
Contact: jilluzz1@providence.edu