PhD Students
Elena Barattini holds a bachelor’s degree from Pavia University. She has spent the last portion of her BA studying at Barnard College, Columbia University. While obtaining her master in Sociology at Turin University, she has done a study abroad period at Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, focusing on Latin American studies. Her MA thesis was titled Acting (into) difference: slavery, women, and resistance in Cuba. She has taken part to a specialization course in Critical Theory at Milano Bicocca University. Her research in the PhD program concerns the legal resistance practices put in place by patrocinadas in Cuba at the end of the XIX century, coping with coercion and constructing pathways towards autonomy. Moreover, connecting global history with gender and labor history, she will analyze continuities and discontinuities between the French rachat and the engagement, the Cuban patronato and the British apprenticeship, emphasizing the role of such work systems, implemented within imperial polities, to preserve the prosperity made through enslaved labor.
Ksenia Belik: Bachelor's degree in History from Chelyabinsk State University (Chelyabinsk, Russia, 2018). Area of study: "Historical Political Science". Master's degree in History from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia, 2020). Area of Study: "Historical Knowledge". Research intern at Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (Moscow, HSE). Sphere of interests: social history of medicine, intellectual history, academic culture, university history.
Miriam Bettamin holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, International and Economics Studies and a Master’s Degree in Comparative International Relations from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her Master’s thesis, focusing on the Administration of US President Jimmy Carter and the “substitution account” – a proposal to reform the international monetary system at the end of the 1970s – solidified her interest in historical research exploring the intricacies between the international economy and US foreign economic policy in the 20th century. Her research project for the PhD in Global History of Empires will branch out to the 1980s, looking at the relationship between the Reagan Administration and the Federal Reserve and at how it shaped US foreign economic relations over the course of the decade.
Massimo Bomboni In 2019 he got a Bachelor’s in History at the University of Florence, discussing a thesis on the Bolognese traveller Ludovico de Varthema and his approach to the various cultures he encountered during his voyages at the beginning of the 16th century. In 2021 Massimo obtained a Master’s degree in Historical Sciences at the University of Florence with a thesis on the Luz family, a Dutch-Sephardic merchants dynasty, and their relations with the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando I de’ Medici at the end of the 16th century. His PhD project will analyse the networks of agents and intermediaries of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici (1587-1609) in the Netherlands, in the context of his State and international policy. The research will focus on the contribution of these mediators to the Gran Duke’s global political, cultural and economic projects.
Anna Bottesi: In 2016 I got my Bachelor’s Degree in History and Protection of Cultural Heritage (Storia e Tutela dei Beni Culturali) at the University of Florence, with a thesis on the Yanomami Collection exposed at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology of Florence. After graduating I spent three months (March-June 2016) in Boa Vista (State of Roraima, Brazil) working on the organization of the CDI — an indigenous documentation center that some missionaries of the Consolata Institute are creating in order to support the indigenous struggle for rights in the northern region of Brazil. In 2019 I got my Master’s Degree in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Turin, with a research thesis on the museological process that a Brazilian indigenous community of the State of Piauí has been undertaking to support its process of ethnic emergency and identity reclaiming. To collect the information required, I spent three months (June-September 2018) living in the indigenous community. My current research focuses on the construction and deconstruction of representation globally produced on Brazilian indigenous peoples, starting from the collection of ethnographic artifacts, in the more general context of renovation and decolonization of ethnographic museums.
Adna Camdzic holds a BA degree in International Relations and a double master’s degree in comparative analysis of Mediterranean societies and international studies obtained at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco and the University of Turin. She earned her master’s with a research thesis on memory politics and transition of the religious field in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a focus on the Srebrenica genocide as “difficult heritage”. Driven by her desire to investigate the complexity of European history and culture, after her MA she worked as an intern at the Memory Studies Association (MSA) and as a research fellow at the contemporary art foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, where she dealt with cultural and artistic approaches to memorialization. Her broad research interests lie in memory studies, heritage studies, oral history and socio-technical transitions. Her doctoral research will investigate the history and governance of Italian nuclear de-industrialization from a global and comparative perspective, drawing from science and technology studies to address its social, technological and ecological dimensions and from cultural heritage studies to address heritage-making issues in the nuclear industry and local communities.
Ekaterina Chechkina holds BA in History at the Kharkiv National University. In 2020 she received her master’s degree graduating from the Surgut State University, where she started investigating the images of Siberia in Soviet literary journals (mid. 1950s to 1969). Working on this topic, she shifted her research focus to the problem of Siberian representations in journal discourse in global scope of transformation from utopian to retrotopian. So currently her research interests lie in the field of transformation of modernity, its environmentalisation and the aspect of returning “to the roots” in 1950s to 1980s, considering the development of Siberian representations as the case of this transformation.
Francesco Paolo Cioffo holds a BA in History from Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2017 he earned an MA in World History and Cultures from King's College, London, and in 2019 he obtained an MA in Japanese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Now as a PhD student in the Global History of Empires joint programme, he is researching the interactions of South Asians and Japanese between the 1860s and the 1930s. His main interest focuses on the ways in which Indians and Japanese constructed different imagined geographies of Asia and how these ideas circulated across trans-imperial networks.
Giovanni Battista Corvino is Ph.D. Fellow in Global History of Empires at University of Turin. In the same University, he holds a M.A. in Criminological and Forensic Psychology (Department of Psychology and Department of Law) and a M.A. in Social Work and Social Policies (Department of Culture, Politics and Society), both cum laude. He also studied at Maltepe University, Harvard University, Trento University, Salamanca University, Sarajevo University, East-Sarajevo University, Milan-Bicocca University and in various Professional Schools. Moreover, before starting his doctorate, he was an archivist at Polytechnic University of Turin. Through the study of lynching of African Americans in the United States, the aim of his research project is to clarify the concept of citizenship and its relationship with race between the end of the 19th century and the second half of the 20th. He already addressed the study of lynching against African Americans in his second master thesis, which has analyzed the origin of this process, its forms and evolution, and the dehumanization that supported its violent racial aversion.
Evgenii Egorov holds his BA in Regional Studies at the Saint-Petersburg University of Telecommunications. His BA thesis covered the problematics of nation-building processes in the 19th century Denmark. Afterwards he received his master’s degree graduating from the Higher School of Economics in Saint-Petersburg. Following his interest in intellectual and global history, as well as initial fascination with Scandinavian history, he analyzed Northern European union proposals from mid-18th to mid-19th centuries in his MA thesis. Examining the history of this region, he had a chance to spend a semester at the University of Copenhagen, combining his studies with archival research there. His current PhD research focuses on the reverberations of Pan-Scandinavian movement in the Russian Empire and especially in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Looking at this encounter between the empire and pan-nationalist project through the optics of new imperial history, he is endeavoring to elucidate ideologies, tools, and practices of diversity management in the imperial borderlands.
Alessandro Favilli obtained his Bachelor's in History at the University of Pisa in 2020, with a thesis concerning the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. In 2022 he got his master's degree at the University of Pisa with a thesis concerning the complex relationship between human rights and development in the European Community's development cooperation. Since I found this argument interesting, I decided to continue my research on this topic, by getting admitted to the Ph.D. program in Global History of Empires.
Eleonora Ferrazzi holds a Bachelor in Political Sciences, International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Padua, spending the last year at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After working two years for a small NGO in Palestine (West Bank), she decided to deepen her (critical) knowledge about International Cooperation, pursuing her Master’s Degree at the University of Turin with a thesis on Feminist Orientalism and Evangelical Maternalism: the British Women’s Path to Public Space, 1790-1865. With the aim to contribute to the History of Gender and Empire by moving away from a notion of empire as exclusively male, her PhD project will focus on the entanglements between Feminism, Empires and the female breakers of the imperial normative order. The thesis will explore the ways in which Victorian Feminism had risen in compliance and resistance to both the Imperial system and European-colonial patriarchy and in which Indian women had limited Western ideas of gender to take root in their culture and society.
Julia García Aranzazu. After having graduated from a History bachelor’s degree at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, I did my first year of master’s degree at the Centre de Recherche Historique du XIXème siècle (CRHXIX) at the Sorbonne, where I worked on medievalism in Spain during the 19th century. I then transferred to the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where I achieved my second year of master’s degree, with a discussion on conflicts of authority in the early 18th century New Granada. The research project I am working on, as a PhD student in the Global History of Empires program, is focused on the question of authority in the Spanish Caribbean during the first half of the 18th century. In a large sense, my research belongs to the field of legal and political history of the Spanish Empire in the first Bourbonic period. In a narrower sense, this project will lead me to research different cases of corruption, privateering and contraband in the Caribbean.
Matias X. Gonzalez studied his bachelor's degree at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City. Following his interest in intellectual and conceptual history, he pursued his master's degree at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research topics have generally regarded the contact of conceptual and intellectual history with social history and the role ideas can have in historical and social dynamics. For his master's dissertation he focused on the origins of socialism in France, reconsidering the fundamental role played by C. H. de Saint-Simon's conceptual innovations. His PhD research is focused on the elaboration of an interconnected history of socialism in France and Mexico towards the mid-nineteenth century, taking into perspective the turbulent process of constitution of both states at the time, as well as considering the roles of Empire and Republic in those conformations.
Iana Gorbatenko holds a Bachelor in Philology from Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg). Her BA work was in the field of gender linguistics. She obtained her MA in History also from Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg). In her Master thesis, she combined historical approach and her previous experience in language studies analyzing emotions in the texts of diaries, which were written during the Siege of Leningrad. At the moment she is a PhD student in the Global History of Empires joint program. Her current PhD research focuses on the participation of women in higher medical education in the interwar period of the 20th century. Sphere of research interests: gender history, social history of medicine, Soviet history, history of higher education, history of emotions, linguistics.
Coleen Holloway holds a Master in History from the University of Bologna, and a Bachelor in Political Science from the University of Seattle in the United States. Her research interests are in 20th century labor history, urban politics, and political philosophy. Her current work is situated within a global history of labor and examines the cases of Detroit and Turin after 1971.
Igor Kuziner holds a specialist degree in telecommunicational systems at State University of Telecommunications (St. Petersburg). He holds M.A. in History of Religions at Russian State Pedagogical University (St. Petersburg). At the moment, is a Ph.D. student of the programme in Global History of Empires at Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg) and at the University of Turin. The broader definition of his field is a state-church relationship in the 20th century. Now, is working on a thesis concerning strategies of adaptation of popular and alternative orthodox movements to the conditions of Soviet internal policy. In the narrower sense, the project deals with how radical religious communities undergo a transformation of Imperial regimes and seek their.
Morgana Lisi graduated from the University of Turin. Her research interests include cultural history, the history of science and the history of knowledge in the early modern Iberian world. Currently, she is exploring the process of epistemological transformation of Natural History in the eighteenth-century Spanish monarchy, focusing on the studies by Creole naturalists in the province of Chile.
Rainer Matos Franco holds a BA degree in International Relations at El Colegio de México (2008-2012). He wrote his BA thesis on postsocialist nostalgia. He studied an MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg (2015-2016) and another MA in Applied and Interdisciplinary History at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg (2018-2019). Rainer is the author of several publications in both academic and opinion journals, on Russian history, postsocialist nostalgia in Russia and Eastern Europe and Russian cultural history, among other topics. He is also the author of two monographs, Historia mínima de Rusia (El Colegio de México, 2017) and Limbos rojizos. La nostalgia por el socialismo en Rusia y el mundo poscomunista (El Colegio de México, 2018). His current PhD research project focuses on the origins of the first global anticommunist movement in the form of Théodore Aubert's Entente Internationale Anticommuniste (1924-1950) through the Conradi-Polunin process of 1923 in Switzerland.
Gloria Berenice Moreno (she|her) holds a MSc in Anthropology with a specialisation in Anthropology of Health from the University of Copenhagen. She has been an affiliate student at University College London and holds a bachelor degree in Anthropology from the University of Bologna. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, sex and bodily practices and her work involves the use of visual mediums such as photography and filmography. Her PhD project proposes to trace the genealogy of the contemporary bodily practice of penile beading, otherwise called pearling, within the institutions of prison, military school, as well as the barrios of La Havana, Cuba. Her research explores how pearling shapes sexual practices and notions of ideal masculinity amongst Cuban men, investigating their connection with patriarchal and machista paradigms, as well as institutional gender policing in revolutionary Cuba.
Erofei Moriakov holds bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. I also hold a master’s degree in history from Collège Universitaire Français de Moscou (Master 1). I worked as an assistant in The Laboratory of Socio-historical Research in the HSE in 2014. Since 2015, I worked as an archivist in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (RGADA). During my years as a student, I studied practices of judicial settlement of conflicts between nobles and serfs, denunciations of seditious speech as a form of resistance, representations of justice in the eighteenth-century Russia. During my PhD I will continue working on practices of resolving conflicts between landlords and serfs in the second half of the 18th century in the Russian empire.
Kristina Moskaleva obtained her Bachelor Degree in History at Higher School of Economics (Moscow). BA diploma was devoted to the study of political interaction between King James I Stuart and English parliament and the analysis of legal cases of the lawyers of common law during the first half of 17th c. in England. She also holds a Master's Degree in Historical Knowledge at Higher School of Economics (Moscow). For Master's Dissertation she focused on the political treatise of James I Stuart ("Basilikon Doron") aiming to investigate the perception of the monarchical political ideas during the 17th c. Current PhD dissertation concerns the transformation of social and political practices of the English court throughout the 17th c.
Andrea Edoardo Paron holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Philosophy and a master's degree in Political science at the University of Turin. His main interest concerns the history of political thought with a specific focus on twentieth-century American political thought. His doctoral research project will investigate how Modernization theory explained the post-colonial evolution of Indo-Pacific countries and its impact on American foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s.
Gabriella Rago is a PhD candidate in Global History of Empires at Università di Torino. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Theoretical Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Social History at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Her Master’s thesis focused on the socio-environmental history of thermonuclear fusion after Chernobyl. Her broad research interests lie in the History of Science and Technology and the Global History of energy.
Matteo Rossi (matteo.rossi@unito.it) is a PhD candidate in Global History of Empires at Università di Torino. He obtained a Bachelor Degree in Political Sciences at Università di Pavia in 2016, a three-year Diploma in Social Sciences at IUSS Pavia in 2017 and a Master Degree in International Relations at Università di Bologna in 2019. Between August and October 2018, he was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York City. His broad research interests lie at the crossroad between nineteenth-century U.S. history, the history of economic thought and the history of political thought. His doctoral research will investigate nineteenth-century U.S. political economy and specifically Henry Charles Carey’s thought, in connection with the transformations of U.S. capitalism and the strengthening of the federal State before and after the Civil War.
Halina Ruleva holds a BA in Journalism from Saint-Petersburg State University. She has obtained her MA in History at the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg in 2023. Her current research is dedicated to the problem of regulating foreign labor migration from Northwestern provinces of the late Russian empire, with a focus on imperial agents and repertoires of power they used in order to control outward mobility of subjects. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, political, social and bureaucratic history of the Russian empire, migration and mobility studies, history of Belarus, as well as transnational and global history.
Hamideh Saberi (hamideh.saberi@unito.it) is a PhD candidate in Global History of Empires at Università di Torino. She studied the History of Islamic Culture and Civilization -an eight-year Bachelor and Master's- in Iran. She obtained the second Master’s degree in global Culture “History and oriental studies" at Bologna University (Italy). Her broad research interests lie in Gender studies (women, feminism, gender, and politics particularly in Iran). Her doctoral research will investigate Iranian women's conditions in late modern times.
Gianpietro Sette holds a BA in History and an MA in Historical Sciences from the University of Padua and an MA from Istanbul University in Studies on the Mediterranean World. Now, as a PhD student in the Global History of Empires joint programme, his research is a comparison between the suppression of piracy in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf in the first 20 years of the 19th century. His research interests are Political and Diplomatic History, International Relations and everything related to piracy in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from the Early Modern Age onwards, with a particular attention to linguistic experts’ intermediaries.
Denis Smetanin holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History from the Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg. He has researched the activity of Novorossiya Governor-General Mikhail Vorontsov through a range of research topics: patron-client relations in Russian Empire of the first half XIX century; the problem of formation views on the southern provinces in Russian Empire and the issue of emergency governance policy in Novorossiya. His PhD project will focus on the emergence of coal and its representation both as a commodity and a political tool in the Russian Empire in the second quarter of XIX century. Coal policy, the mining industry, transport networks, technical expertise and new intellectual discourses related to the coal problem and its development in the Russian Empire will be framed into the global context of the industrial revolution in Europe and the United States.
Mattia Steardo. I obtained my bachelor degree in History at the University in Turin. There, I developed a strong interest in global history, and therefore I started a Research Master in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University (The Netherlands). During my years at Leiden, I completed an internship at KITLV, and I was granted with a LUF and a KNIR scholarships for writing my MA thesis. Currently, I am doing research on the economic and intellectual history of post-imperial Buenos Aires, following my interests in the intellectual history of economic ideas, economic history and global history.
Kristina Turenko holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History (Higher School of Economics, Moscow). Since 2017 she has been studying the war of independence in Latin America. Her Bachelor’s thesis was devoted to the US example in the political and legal heritage of the Spanish-American revolutionaries. From 2017 to 2020 she worked as a teaching assistant for courses “Introduction of the history of mankind” and “Social history of modern and contemporary times”. During Master’s studies the focus of her research shifted towards Mexican intellectual history. The MA diploma was dedicated to the building of the Mexican nation, meaning social and political disputes about new forms of the state (1821-1836). As a PhD student she will continue working in the field of intellectual and transnational history focusing on the formation and evolution of Mexican sovereignty (1810-1876).
Xinyi ZHOU’s research deals with the rise of anti-imperial nationalism in China and Asia as well as its entanglement with fascism and Pan-Asianism during the interwar period. This approach seeks to deepen our understanding on one of the most perplexing characteristics of the era – internationalism within nationalism. To unravel that complexity, he will identify and exploit sources at multiple, far-flung archives from Rome to Taipei and Nanjing, and probably elsewhere as well. Before embarking on doctoral research, Zhou obtained master’s degree in History and Oriental Studies (in the Global Cultures curriculum) at University of Bologna. Prior to that, he worked and advised multinational corporations in China focusing on public relations and public affairs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business management from Shanghai University of International Business and Economics.