Research Interests

My main research interest is the socio-cultural history of modern Italy. I have written in particular on issues related to the history of industrialization and social change, social quantification and the making of social categories and representations, nationalism and the construction of national identities, and gender. I am currently completing projects related to my interest in the discourse of Italian patriotism/nationalism; one of them is a co-edited book on the new historiography on nineteenth-century Italian nationalism. My next research project will be on Italian orientalism and colonialism.

My main publications include the prize-winning Numbers and Nationhood. Writings Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 1996), a study of the production and politics of statistics in the Italian Risorgimento (i.e. the struggle for Italian unification). I have published several essays on the social and cultural history of modern Italy including “Essayists and Journalists, c. 1850-1914,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. L. Panizza and S. Wood (Cambridge University Press, 2000); “Gender Trouble: Women and the Making of Italy’s ‘Active Population’, 1861-1936,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 3:2 (1998); “How Many Italies? Representing the South in Official Statistics,” in Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country, ed. J. Schneider (Berg, 1998). More recently I have published a number of studies on Italian nationalism: “Indolence and Regeneration. Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” American Historical Review 110: 2 (April 2005); “National Identity or National Character? New Vocabularies and Old Paradigms,” in Making and Remaking Italy. The Cultivation of National Identity Around the Risorgimento, ed. A. R. Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (Berg, 2001); “Italian Neo-Patriotism: Debating National Identity in the 1990s,” Modern Italy 6:1 (2001). My forthcoming book on the politics of the discourse of national character in modern Italy is entitled Italian Vices. Nation and Character Since the Risorgimento. An Italian translation will be published by Laterza.