Research Bio
I am a specialist of early modern Italy (1500-1800), and I have a strong interest in Gramsci, Marxism, and historical method. Reading the archive against the grain, my work strives to recover voices silenced by official narratives, including those of exiles, refugees, and persecuted minorities. I have also published on the intellectual history of colonialism, and on the ways in which European expansion shaped the Enlightenment and its idea of knowledge. My current research focuses on 3 main areas:
- Refugees and forced displacement in the early modern world
- Indigeneity, Colonialism, and the Enlightenment
- Gramsci and Western Marxism
I have published four monographs, and co-edited four volumes. My most recent books are: Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Displacement in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Challenging the stereotype of displaced people as voiceless victims, I study the emergence of ‘refugee literature’ in the early modern period. I argue that writing provided refugees not only with a new home, that filled the void of their lost homeland, but also with a forum through which rights and resettlement policies were negotiated. This book expands in new directions on the work that I have begun in The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Cornell University Press, 2018), awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies.
In The Atlantic Republic of Letters. Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026), I study the transatlantic circulation of books and information in the long eighteenth-century and show that early American scholars envisioned and coordinated the colonial project. While placing the ‘taxonomic impulse’ at the center of the Enlightenment, I argue that various disciplines and intellectual practices - such as botany, antiquarianism, and bibliography - served as the instruments of European order, facilitating the classification and subjugation of North America’s nature and peoples. A brief discussion of the book can be found on the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. Materials from the book have appeared in “How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 2025/1, 75-107, and “Negotiating on the Frontier: Indian Treaties and the Republic of Letters,” in Reframing Treaties in the Medieval and Early Modern West (Oxford University Press, 2025), 423-442.
I especially enjoy collaborative work. This has led me to carry out projects with colleagues in the US, Canada, Italy, and France, and co-edit several volumes, that rethink Mediterranean studies, early modern Catholicism, and the history of peace-making, including: Braudel's La Méditerranée: Paradigms and Possibilities after 75 Years, co-edited with Rowan Dorin, Republics of Letters, 2026; Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, co-edited with Isabella Lazzarini and Luciano Piffanelli (Oxford University Press, 2025); Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy. Space, Gender, Mobility, co-edited with John Christopoulos, Religions, 2023. I am currently co-editing two special issues: Carrefours des savoirs. L’Italie et la République des Lettres (XVIe-XXe siècles), with Vincenza Perdichizzi, (for Laboratoire italien), and Troubling Literature: Engaging with Victoria Kahn, with David Marno and Jane Tylus (for MLN).
I held visiting Professorships at Dartmouth College and UCLA, where I was the 2024/25 Speroni Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I was a fellow of Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and a Senior Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. I am grateful to have received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Hellman Foundation, the France-Berkeley Fund, the Houghton Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.
I have directed dissertations and served on dissertation committees at Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvard (in the Departments of Italian, History, English, Music, Comparative Literature, French, Spanish and Portuguese). I welcome inquiries from all interested prospective students.
Selected publications:
- Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Displacement in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
- “Galileo and the Republic of Letters,” in Galileo’s Letters: Experiments in Friendship, ed. Paula Findlen and Hannah Markus (University of Chicago Press, 2026).
Research Expertise and Interest
Renaissance Europe, early modern Europe, the enlightenment, refugee history, Atlantic History, History of Books and Reading, colonialism, history of science and technology, Gramsci, Marxism, historiography