Global History of Empires

Tommaso Bobbio. I obtained my PhD in History of South Asia at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2010 with a thesis investigating dynamics of urban socio/spatial change in Ahmedabad in relation to issues of citizenship and the rise of collective violence. The core of my research is located in India. My interests span across three main themes: 1) issues of social and spatial marginalisation, the understanding and practice of rural/urban relations amongst marginal inhabitants of the city, as well as the creation and theorisation of urban citizenship across the twentieth century; 2) the relationship between narratives of history, collective memory and nationalism through the production and preservation of heritage; 3) the rise of public health a “tool ofo social control” in colonial South Asia, the impact of diseases and famines in the encounter beween the colonial and the local in early nineteenth-century India and the long-term socio-cultural, political, economic and spatial effects on the dynamics of urban expansion. Beside a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, I published a monograph in 2015 - Urbanisation, Citizenship and Conflict in India (Routledge 2015) - which investigated the interconnection of political, social, and economic forces that contributed to foster tensions and to modify the urban space.

Giovanni Borgognone is associate professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Turin, where he teaches History of Political Thought, International Political Theory, Theories and History of Democracy. His research focuses on the history of modern and contemporary political thought. He specializes in American political thought, global history of ideas, technocracy, managerialism and élites theory. He edits the book series Politikòn Zôon published by Aracne. He is member of the editorial board of Storia del pensiero politico and Passato e presente. His main publications include Max Eastman e le libertà americane (Milan, 2004), La destra americana. Dall’isolazionismo ai neocons (Rome-Bari, 2004), Il socialismo dal basso. Hal Draper e la rifondazione democratica del marxismo (Florence, 2008), Superpower Europe? Interpretazioni statunitensi del «sogno europeo» (Milan, 2010), Come nasce una dittatura. L’Italia del delitto Matteotti (Rome-Bari, 2012, 2013²), Storia degli Stati Uniti. La democrazia americana dalla fondazione all’era globale (Milan, 2013, 2016²), Tecnocrati del progresso. Il pensiero politico americano del Novecento tra capitalismo, liberalismo e democrazia (Turin, 2015). He is the editor of the Italian translation of R.F. Kennedy’s discourses Sogno cose che non sono state mai (Turin, 2012).

Marzia Casolari is associate professor of Asian History at the University of Turin, a founding member and a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Asian Studies (Centro di Studi sull’Asia – ISA) in Turin. She is president of Asia Maior, the Italian think tank on Asia and has been member of the Scientific Board of Asia Maior journal. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pisa, an MA in Oriental Hisotry from the University of Bologna and held a 2-years post-graduation fellowship from the Italian Ministry of External Affairs, under the Indo-Italian Cultural Exchange Programme, to carry out an extensive research on the ties between Italian fascism and Nazism and Indian radical nationalism. She has been teaching at the University of Bologna and Perugia. Among her publications, two authored books, In the Shadow of the Swastika. The Relationships Between Indian Nationalism, Italian Fascism and Nazism (Routledge) and The British Strategic Imperative in South Asia and Its Role in India’s Partition: 1942-1947, QuaDri, Quaderni di Ricognizioni, Torino, 2017, two edited books, Sguardi sull’Asia. Scritti in onore di Michelguglielmo Torri (Odoya) and Gandhi after Gandhi. The relevance of the Mahatma’s Legacy in Today’s World (Routledge, forthcoming), and about 30 articles and book chapters on Indian and South Asian history and politics. She releases interviews to the media (RAI, Radio Vaticana, Swiss Radiotelevision) on present South Asian politics.

Michela Catto (PHD in History, Scuola Normale of Pise and Marie Curie Fellow at the EHESS in Paris) teaches Early Modern History and History of Globalization at the University of Turin. Her primary research focuses on the religious and cultural history of the early modern age with special regards to the history of Jesuits and their global missions. She is the author of La Compagnia divisa. Il dissenso nell’ordine gesuitico tra ’500 e ’600 (Brescia, 2009, 2022; Ciudad de México, 2016); Cristiani senza pace. La chiesa, gli eretici e la guerra nella Roma del Cinquecento (Roma, 2012). She has edited with Adriano Prosperi, Trent and Beyond. The Council, other Powers, other Cultures, Brepols, 2017; with Isabel Drumond Braga, La lotta per l’egemonia mondiale. Tra politica e religione: gesuiti, castigliani e portoghesi monograph number of the «Revista LibrosdelaCorte.es» (spring-summer, 2022).

Mario Aldo Cedrini. Full professor of economics at the Department of Economics and Statistics "Cognetti de Martiis", where he teaches economics, macroeconomics, and ecological economics, his work has mainly focused, in the past, on John Maynard Keynes’s epistemological and methodological reflections and suggestions for global reform, whereas he is currently working on economics as a discipline. His research group has been awarded two research grants by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (PRIN 2017 and PRIN 2022) to explore using text mining techniques whether economics has finally become, at a time of increasing specialization and fragmentation, an “immature” science, and whether journals, as a consequence, have become a major force in structuring the discipline.
One of the editors of The Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, he has published Economics as Social Science. Economics Imperialism and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity (with R. Marchionatti, Routledge 2017), and Secondo Keynes. Il disordine economic internazionale e le speranze di una nuova Bretton Woods (with A. Carabelli, Castelvecchi 2014), as well as a series of articles in international economics journals (EJHET, CJE, JoIE, JEM, JPKE, JEI, RRPE, FSE, HEI). He has served as Secretary-General of the Italian Association for the History of Political Economy (STOREP) for 2015-2021 and is now a member of the Executive Committee. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) and of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino. 

Barbara Curli (Ph.D. in History, European University Institute, Florence) is Professor of Contemporary history in the Department of Cultures Politics and Society of Turin University, where she also teaches Geopolitical history of energy sources and History of European integration. She has been visiting scholar at Sorbonne, Paris; St.Joseph, Beirut; Paris Est-Marne la Vallée; Université catholique de Louvain; New York University in Florence; Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Italian and European history, Georgetown University; visiting professor of World economic history at Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. She is member of the Comité d'histoire de l'électricité et de l'énergie de la Fondation Electricité de France (Paris) and of the editorial Board of “Italia contemporanea”, and was Editor in Chief, Il Mestiere di storico (2011-2014) and member of the Scientific Board of Fondazione Leonardo-Civiltà delle Macchine (2019-2022). Main research interests: history of energy, nuclear energy, history of European integration, Mediterranean history (Suez Canal), gender history. She is the editor of Discourses and Counter-Discourses on Europe. From the Enlightenment to the EU (with M. Ceretta) Routledge 2017; Italy and the Suez Canal, from the mid-Nineteenth century to the Cold War, Palgrave 2022; Les territoires des transitions énergétiques. Socio-histoire localisée du nucléaire et des énergies renouvelables en Italie et en France (with C. Mattina, E. Bini, P. Fournier), Aix-en-Provence, Karthala, Editions de la Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme, 2023.

Javier González Díez is associate professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin. Previously, he was professor of Social Sciences at the National University of Education of Ecuador (UNAE), Visiting Researcher at the French Institute of Pondicherry in India (IFP-CNRS), and at the University of Nice in France. He has done ethnographical and historical-anthropological research in Gabon and South India, and he is currently researching in Ecuadorian Andes. His research topics are popular languages and dynamics of subaltern urbanization, kinship and kinning processes and childhood circulation, decolonial indigenous discourses and alternative narratives on history. He has been Director of the Research Group in Decolonial Education and South Epistemologies (EduSUR) and he is currently member of the Working Group on Anti Patriarchal Fights, Families, Genders, Diversities and Citizenships of CLACSO (Latin American Council for Social Sciences). He is member of the editorial board of “Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani”. 

Lorenzo Kamel is associate professor of History at the University of Turin, IAI's Research Studies director, and the scientific director of the New-Med Research Network. He holds a 2-years MA in Israel Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a PhD in History from the University of Bologna, and held teaching and research positions in many universities in the Middle East, the US, and Europe, including the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where he served as a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher, and Harvard University, where he was also a Postdoc Fellow for 2 years. He is the editor of 3 book series and a regular contributor to media outlets such as Al-Jazeera and Rai1.  Among his publications, 5 authored books – including ‘The Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities (Edinburgh UP) and 'Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times’ (IB Tauris) – for which he was awarded with the 1st Prize of the Palestine Academic Book Award, the G.Sciacca International Prize, and the Fritz-Thyssen Grant. Other publications include 6 edited books - including ‘Arab Spring and Peripheries’ (Routledge) - and over 30 articles on the British Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, Mediterranean Politics, Oriente Moderno, Eurasian Studies, New Middle Eastern Studies, International Spectator, Contemporanea, Passato e Presente. He is 38 years old and the proud father of Valerie and Niccolò.

Marco Mariano (marco.mariano@unito.it) is associate professor of U.S. History at the University of Turin, Italy. He specializes in inter-American relations, modern Atlantic history, and U.S. intellectual history. He has been research fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University and at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies of New York University. He was also chargé de enseignement at SciencesPo in Paris and Reims. He is the editor of Defining the Atlantic Community. Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Routledge 2010) and the author of L’America nell’“Occidente”. Storia della dottrina Monroe (America in “the West”. A History of the Monroe Doctrine, Carocci 2013). He is currently working on the construction of the “Western hemisphere” through 20^th century and on consular networks in the 19^th-century Atlantic world. His latest publications are: “The Modern Atlantic Space: a History that ‘Dare not Speak its Name’?”, Journal of Transnational American Studies 8, 1 (2017); “‘Un pont sur l’Atlantique’. Transatlantic Steamers and Nation Building in the Kingdom of Sardinia, 1830-1859”, Contemporanea 21, 2 (2018).

Federica Morelli is Associate Professor of History of the Americas at the University of Turin, where she teaches History of the Atlantic World, Latin American History and Colonial&Postcolonial History. Her work centers on colonial Latin American history, the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions, the construction of citizenship and racial categories in 18th- and 19th- century Spanish America. She has been the coordinator of the PhD program in Global History of Empires and is a member of the steering committee of the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH). She has held visiting fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence (RI), at the Institut de Hautes Etudes sur l’Amérique Latine in Paris, and at the European University Institute in Florence. Among her main publications: Territorio o Nación. Reforma y disolución del espacio imperial en Ecuador, 1765-1830 (Madrid, 2005), Il Mondo Atlantico. Una storia senza confini (Roma, 2013), L’indipendenza dell’America spagnola. Dalla crisi della monarchia alle nuove repubbliche (Firenze, 2015), De los Andes al Atlántico. Territorio, constitución y ciudadanía en la crisis del imperio español (Quito, 2018).

Giandomenico Piluso, after graduating cum laude at the University of Milan, completed his PhD in Economic and Social History at Bocconi University in 1997. He is currently associate professor of Economic History at the University of Turin, Department of Humanities. He has held academic positions, as an adjunct professor, at Bocconi University (2000-2014) and at the University of Eastern Piedmont (2000-2003), and, as a lecturer and associate professor, at the University of Siena, Department of Economics and Statistics (2005-2021). He has been a visiting fellow at King’s College, University of Cambridge, in 2011 and at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, in 2015. He was a Jean Monnet fellow at Robert Schumann Centre of Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, Florence, in 2016-2017. Outside academia, presently, he is a member of the scientific committee of Fondazione Feltrinelli, Milan. His main research interests focus on banking and monetary history and on business history, mainly referred to the nineteenth and twentieth century. More recently his research interests have been including central banking and European monetary integration. Amongst his recent publications: “Deregulation, Regulatory Convergence or Escaping from Inefficiency? The Italian Financial System in the 1970s and 1980s”, in Y. Cassis and A. Drach (eds.) Financial Deregulation: A Historical Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021; “Reshaping the external constraint. Franco Modigliani, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and the EMS, 1977-1993”, in History of Economic Thought and Policy, 2020, 2; "Adjusting to Financial Instability in the Interwar Period. Italian Financial Elites, International Cooperation and Domestic Regulation", in Cassis Y. and Telesca G. (eds.) Financial Elites in European Banking: Historical Perspectives, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018; "Italy: Building on a long insurance heritage", in P. Borscheid and N.V. Haueter (eds.), World Insurance. The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Sofia Venturoli is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Turin where she teaches Latin American anthropology and Political anthropology. Sofia received her M.Litt in Social Anthropology and Amerindian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland and her PhD in anthropology at University of Bologna in Italy. Her main research interests include social and cultural changes among Latin-American indigenous groups, ethnogenesis, indigenous groups in urban areas, indigenous political participation with particular attention to gender perspectives, collective and individual self-representation. She has fieldwork experiences in the quechua Peruvian Andes, in the zoque area of Chiapas, Mexico, among the Pankararé group in the São Paulo metropolitan area in Brasil, and among migrant Peruvian communities in Italy. Among her publications: Formas de ciudadanía en América Latina (with Mirta Lobato) 2013, Los Hijos de Huari. Historia y etnografía de tres pueblos andinos 2011, Il paesaggio come testo. La creazione di un’identità tra territorio e memoria nell’area andina 2005.

Martin Aust teaches Eastern European and Russian History at Bonn University (Germany). His areas of research are 18/19th-century imperial Russia, 19th-century Russia in global history and contested memories in relations between Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. His latest publications are books on the Russian revolutions and Russia's imperial heritage: Die Russische Revolution. Vom Zarenreich zum Sowjetimperium, Munich 2017 (C.H. Beck) and Die Schatten des Imperiums. Russland seit 1991, Munich 2019 (C.H. Beck).

Francesca Biancani (University of Bologna).

Tatiana Borisova is an Associate Professor of History at the National Research University Higher School of Economics St. Petersburg. She holds two PhD degrees in History (from St.Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences) and Law (from University of Turku). She published widely on various aspects of Russian legal tradition in international legal and historical journals. Her most recent articles include: Public Meaning of the Zasulich Trial 1878: Law, Politics, and Gender (2016) and Russia’s Legal Trajectories (2018) (with Jane Burbank). She co-edited a study The Legal Dimension in Cold-War Interactions: Some Notes from the Field (Brill, 2012). She held fellowships at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies  of (University of Oxford), Helsinki Collegium.  In 2018-19 she was awarded Davis Centre Fellowship at Princeton University to work on her monograph entitled: ‘For my enemies, the law’: A Cultural History of Law and Justice in Russia, 1860-1905.

Patricia Chiantera-Stutte is Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Bari. She was Fellow at the ITC in Trento, Jean Monnet Fellow at the EUI,  DAAD Fellow at the University of Cologne and at the IFL Centre in Leipzig. Her works deal with the History of Intellectuals, Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Fascism, Populism. Among her publications: Von der Avantgarde zum Traditionalismus, Die radikalen Futuristen im Italienischen Faschismus von 1919 zu 1931, Frankfurt 2002; with L. Cedroni, Questioni di biopolitica, Roma, 2003; with Marzocca et al., Lessico di biopolitica, Roma 2007 (also translated in French); Delio Cantimori, Roma, 2011; Il Pensiero Geopolitico, Roma, 2014; Animus Comune. Le lettere di Werner Kaegi e Delio Cantimori, Pisa, 2019.

Dario Fazzi is Associate Professor of U.S. History at Leiden University and Senior Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, the Netherlands. His research focuses on the interplay between socio-political and environmental history. He is particularly interested in studying how the transformation of American democracy at home and the projection of U.S. power abroad have affected the global ecosystem and, more specifically, how the growth and expansion of the modern U.S. military-industrial complex has impacted our planet’s waterscapes. He has authored books, co-edited volumes and special issues, and published book chapters and articles on twentieth century transatlantic relations, Cold War’s anti-nuclear protests, envirotech systems and innovations, U.S. base politics, and anti-toxics and environmental justice movements. He is a Board member of the U.S. American Studies Association, the Netherlands Association for American Studies, and the Blue History Network. When he is not playing with his little son, he also likes to disseminate his research findings through popular outlets such as the Environment and Society Portal or The Washington Post.

Olivier Feiertag is professor of Contemporary History at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Ecole d’Histoire de la Sorbonne. Ph.D. in History at Université de Paris 10 – Nanterre (1994), between 2004 and 2019 he was professor of Economic History at the University of Rouen. His research deals with the history of international monetary and financial relations in the XXth century, the role of central banks, the regulation of financial systems, colonial and post-colonial monetary history. Recent publications include: Les banques centrales pendant la Grande Guerre (with Michel Margairaz), Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2019; Bank Al-Maghrib, L’émergence d’une banque centrale du XXe au XXIe siècle. 2016 ⟨hal-02361325⟩; Le sens de la mondialisation: surveillance bancaire et globalisation financière du XXe au XXIe siècle. Monde(s). Histoire, Espaces, Relations, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018, 13, 1.

Arturo Marzano (Rome, 1973) is Associate Professor at the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa. He got his PhD in Contemporary History at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, and has been Post-doc Research Fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research - Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; Senior Research Fellow at the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris 2); Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute; Visiting Researcher at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and at the American University Beirut. His research mainly deals with history of Judaism, Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the relationship between Italy and the Middle East in the XX century. Among his main publications, there are the volumes Una terra per rinascere. Gli ebrei italiani e l’immigrazione in Palestina prima della guerra (1920-1940) [A land to be born again: The Italian Jews and Their Migration to Palestine before the War (1920-1940)], Milano, 2003; Onde fasciste. La propaganda araba di Radio Bari (1934-43) [Fascist Waves. Radio Bari’s Arab Propaganda (1934-43)], Roma 2015; Storia dei sionismi. Lo stato degli ebrei da Herzl a oggi [History of Zionisms. The State of the Jews from Herzl to nowadays], Roma 2017.

Xosé M. Núñez Seixas obtained his Ph.D. at EUI Florence, and is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Santiago de Compostela; between 2012 and 2017 he also taught at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He has published widely on the comparative history of national movements, nation-building and territorial identities in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as on overseas migration, the cultural history of war and violence, and the memory of war and dictatorships. Among his latest books are: (ed.), The First World War and the Nationality Question in Europe (Leiden/Boston 2020); Sites of the Dictators. Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945-2020 (London, 2021); The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945: War, Occupation, Memory (Toronto, 2022), and Volver a Stalingrado. El frente del este en la memoria europea, 1945.2021 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022, forthcoming).

Jean-Frédéric Schaub teaches at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). Specialist in the comparative history of the Iberian Empires, he has been visiting professor at Yale, Michigan, Oxford, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and NYU. He has published as single author books about different topics: the Jewish community in the Northern African city of Oran; the union of Spanish and Portuguese crowns in Renaissance Europe; the influence of the Spanish religious and political models on absolutist France; the historical background of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko; the challenge of writing a global history of Europe. His essay on politics and race in historical perspective came out in 2015 in French (Seuil) and in 2019 in English (Princeton UP).

Alexander M. Semyonov, Ph.D., is John J. McCloy ’22 Visiting Professor of History at Amherst College (USA). Previously, he was the founding chair of the department of history and the Center for Historical Research at the HSE University in St. Petersburg (Russia). He is a co-founder and co-editor of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space and co-editor with Ronald Suny of a book series “Imperial Transformations” (with Routledge). Semyonov have had visiting positions at the W. Averell Harriman Institute, Columbia University (USA), Center for European Studies, Rutgers University (USA), Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany), Bielefeld University, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, the University of Regensburg and LMU (Germany), University of Jyvaskyla (Finland), the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA), and University of Chicago (USA). He edited and authored: New Imperial History of the Post-Soviet Space (Kazan: Center for the Study of Empire and Nationalism, 2004) Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009); Myths and Misconceptions in Studies of Nationalism and Empire (Moscow: Novoe izdatel'stvo, 2010); Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2014); New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 2 vols. (Kazan: Ab Imperio, 2017). His most recent publications include: “Imperial Parliament for a Hybrid Empire: Representative Experiments in the Early 20th-Century Russian Empire,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, 11:1 (2020): 30-39 and (co-authored with Ilya Gerasimov) The World Humanities Report:  Perspective from Russia, 2022, commissioned by Consortium of Humanities Centers and the Institutes (CHCI) and the International Council for Philosophy and the Human Sciences (CIPSH)-UNESCO. His research interests include global and entangled history of imperial formations and historical diversity, imperial imaginaries and transformations, history of liberalism, citizenship and politics of belonging, history of World War I, global and entangled history of parliamentarism and constitutions, history of the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Department of History, Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg and the editor-in-cheif of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the journal of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA). His research interests interlink the anthropology of the state and theories of exchange, post-socialist transformations, historical legacies of empires and Soviet socialism. He specialises on Siberia and Russia, and international relations between Russia, Western Europe and the United States. His publications include article, e.g., “Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2018), and monographs Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time (HAU Malinowski Monograph Series and Chicago University Press 2017) and The Social Life of the State in Sub-Arctic Siberia (Stanford University Press 2003), and the exhibition catalogue Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Pinakotheke 2006).