The Department of International Relations
2010/2011 Lecture Series
Presents
Dr Nicholas Vella
Department of Classics and Archeology
University of Malta
In a Public Lecture on
"You are the Italian Lawrence in Malta ..."
Politics and archaeology in Malta
between the two World Wars.
Date: Friday 8th April 2011
Time: 15.00-16.00
Venue: Lecture Centre 216
Look out for upcoming public lectures being hosted by
the Department of International Relations delivered by the following participants
H.E. Mr Douglas Kmiec, Ambassador of the United States of America to Malta
Prof Przemyslaw Biskup, Chair of European Studies University of Warsaw; author of, Conflicts between Community
and National Laws: an Analysis of the British Approach (2003)
Dr Naveed Sheikh, Keele University; author of The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of
States (2007) and Saudi State, Wahabi World: The Globalization of Muslim Radicalism (2009)
For further information please contact
the Department of International Relations on 2340 3083 or valentina.cassar@um.edu.mt
Between the two World Wars the nationalist cause in Malta received much help from the Italian government. This
lecture explores the ramifications of the research that a young prehistorian, Luigi Maria Ugolini (1895-1936), was
commissioned to carry out on the megalithic remains of Malta. In particular, it considers the role played by
archaeology to legitimate the nationalist cause. The account will start with a chance encounter that happened in the
Pincio gardens in Rome in the autumn of 1998 and a series of discoveries that ensued.
Nicholas C. Vella BA (Hons), PhD is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Malta. His research interests
are varied but his lecturing duties compel him to concentrate on issues of archaeological method and theory (in
particular landscape archaeology), Phoenician archaeology, and western Mediterranean prehistory. At the moment
he is busy collating for publication the archive of the Italian archaeologist Luigi Maria Ugolini and writing up a
number of archaeological reports for fieldwork he co-directs. He was Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome in
1998-1999, Research Associate at the American University of Beirut in 2006 and Getty Visiting Scholar in 2007. He
co-edited for Equinox (UK) the book Debating Orientalization: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Change in the Ancient
Mediterranean (2006) and has just completed co-editing for the British School at Rome the book Identifying the
Punic Mediterranean.