Our Research Group
Imperial Entanglements is a project based on the collaboration between scholars from three different Italian universities.
Università di Napoli Federico II
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Università del Piemonte Orientale
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Università di Venezia Ca' Foscari
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The Team
Daniela Luigia Caglioti
Member
Università di Napoli Federico II
Daniela Luigia Caglioti (PhD, EUI, Florence, 1992) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Naples Federico II and coordinator of the Ph.D. Program in Global History and Governance of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale.
Caglioti was a visiting fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Twice a member of the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, she was also a visiting fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, and the Remarque Institute, New York University.
Her latest outputs include War and Citizenship: Enemy Aliens and National Belonging from the French Revolution to the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; ‘Subjects, Citizens, and Aliens in a Time of Upheaval: Naturalizing and Denaturalizing in Europe during the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 89 (2017), 3, 495-530; ‘Waging War on Civilians: The Expulsion of Aliens in the Franco-Prussian War’, Past & Present, 221, November 2013, pp. 161-195; Stranieri nemici. Nazionalismo e politiche di sicurezza in Italia durante la Prima Guerra mondiale, Roma, Viella, 2023.
Olindo De Napoli
Principal Investigator
Università di Napoli Federico II
Olindo De Napoli is Associate Professor of Modern History. Law degree at the University of Naples Federico II (2006), PhD in Analysis and Interpretation of European Societies (2008) and in History of Law (2013), then researcher at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples (2015). De Napoli has received fellowships from various research institutes, among which the Institute for Advanced Study – Princeton (2014-2015), and has been visiting scholar at European Institute, Columbia University (2013) and Universidad de Huelva (2018).
De Napoli has been a member of the Prin 2015 project “War & Citizenship: Redrawing the boundaries of citizenship in the First World War and its aftermath” and of the Prin 2017 "Legal History and Mass Migration" and is currently a member of the board of the PhD in Global History and Governance, at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale.
His main research interests focus on the history of colonialism, citizenship, criminal law, and racism. His latest book is Selvaggi criminali. Storia della deportazione penale nell'Italia liberale (Laterza, 2024)
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Paolo Fonzi
Member
Università di Napoli Federico II
Paolo Fonzi is currently Associate Professor at the University of Naples Federico II. He has been post-doc research fellow at the Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia of Milan, at the German Historical Institute of Rome, Skhlar Fellow at Harvard Ukraine Research Institute, Gerda Henkel Fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin. His research has been focused on the history of Fascism, especially of Nazi Germany, a subject to which he has dedicated his first monograph on the Nazi Monetary Plans for Post-War Europe. He has also dedicated two monographs and a number of journal articles to the history of the Fascist occupations in the Balkans during the Second World War. In his investigation of occupations he combines an approach from above, informed by the most recent studies of Fascism as a transnational phenomenon, and one “from below”, strongly grounded in the methods of social history.
Andrea Revelant
Group coordinator in Venice
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Andrea Revelant is Associate Professor of Japanese History in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on policy making, popular representation and mass communication in imperial Japan. He is currently working on the political discourse on China in the Japanese press of the interwar years. He is the author of Sviluppo economico e disuguaglianza (Economic Development and Inequality, 2016), Il Giappone moderno (Modern Japan, 2018) and Il Giappone contemporaneo (Contemporary Japan, forthcoming in 2024). He has published in several journals, including Modern Asian Studies, European Journal of East Asian Studies and Asiatische Studien. His work has also appeared in edited volumes, such as Japan and the Great War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Chiang Kai-Shek and His Time and The Historian’s Gaze (both Venice University Press, 2017, 2023). Since 2023 he has been a managing editor for the International Encyclopedia of the First World War 1914-1918-online.
He has held visiting positions at Meiji (2011), Keio (2012, 2017, 2021, 2022), Waseda (2013, 2014, 2018), Sophia (2015) and Aoyama Gakuin (2019) Universities in Tokyo. Under the Erasmus programme, he taught in Geneva, Heidelberg and Berlin. He obtained his PhD in Venice after a two-year research stay at Waseda University.
Irene Gaddo
Group coordinator at Università del Piemonte Orientale
Irene Gaddo holds a PhD in Historical Sciences and currently is researcher in Early Modern History at the Department for Sustainable Development and Ecological Transition (DISSTE), University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli (Italy), where she lectures in Modern History and History of Tourism. She was Research Fellow at the Fondazione Einaudi, Turin (Italy). Her scientific interests mainly focus on the Society of Jesus, history of travels and missions in modern era. Among her publications: Secolarizzazione e modernità. Un quadro storico (with Edoardo Tortarolo) (Rome: Carocci, 2017); “Confronting Nationalities. Italian Jesuits in China in the late seventeenth century”, in Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture. Knowledge and Representation of the World in Italy from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, ed. by G. Abbattista (Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2021), 91-108; “Donne e montagna: viaggi e scritture femminili sulle Alpi occidentali tra XIX e XX secolo”, Genesis, XXII/1 (2023): 65-88.
She is currently working on the English edition of the first Italian Indipetae (Jesuit petitions for overseas missions) for the Boston Institute for Jesuit Sources (together with Emanuele Colombo and Guido Mongini).
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Elisabeth Bruyère
Research Fellow
Università di Napoli Federico II
Bernhard Leitner studied Japanese Studies and Philosophy at University of Vienna and Tokyo Metropolitan University. He completed his PhD-thesis on cooperation in psychiatry and neurology between the Universities of Vienna and Tokyo in the late 19th and early 20th century at the University of Vienna. He was Toshiba Foundation Fellow, Junior- and Research-Fellow at the IFK (International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna) and held visiting fellowships at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and the Friedrich Schiedel-Chair in Sociology of Sciences at the Technical University of Munich. As Soon-Young Kim Fellow in the History of East Asian Science and Technology at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge (UK) he started to develop a postdoctoral research project on colonial legacies of medical research in East Asia, following the trajectories of flows of knowledge and practices circulating between Austria, Japan, and Korea in the 20th century. He currently continues this project as part of the PRIN project at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Elisabeth Bruyère holds a Doctorate in Law (University of Ghent) and is a researcher in contemporary history. She worked for KADOC-KULeuven from March 2021 to March 2022, making inventories of the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII. She then developed a research project on the indigenous clergy of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the Academia Belgica in Rome (2022), Elisabeth Bruyère was supported by the Lambert Darchis Foundation to continue her research at the Vatican (2022-2023). This two and a half year stay in Italy enabled her to examine in depth the various funds of the Holy See relating to Central Africa.
Bruyère studied law at the University of Liège. She then benefited from a BOF grant (Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds) for four years to work on the legal scholar and philosopher François Laurent at the University of Ghent. In this context, she carried out research stays in Paris and Rome. In September 2022 she joined the CORE research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel as a teaching assistant.
Bruyère is currently a member of the PRIN Project at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples Federico II.
Arlena Buelli
Research Fellow
Università di Napoli Federico II
Arlena Buelli is a Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the University of Naples Federico II. She obtained her PhD in Global History from the University of Bologna and was a Research Fellow at the Luigi Einaudi Foundation. Her research, supported by archival work in South Africa, Morocco, the US, the UK, and France, includes peer-reviewed publications exploring transimperial policing of anticolonialists, intercolonial antifascism, and Arab-Black encounters during the Spanish Civil War. One of her first major articles, published in the Journal of Global History, won the 2023 Annual Article Prize of the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History. She is currently working on her first book, focusing on the transnational circulation of anticolonial and antiracist periodicals in Africa and the African diaspora during the 1910s-40s.
Francesco Paolo Cioffo
Research Fellow
Università Ca' Fpscari di Venezia
Francesco Paolo Cioffo is at the final stage of his PhD in Global History of Empires at the University of Turin. He has been studying the "Indo-Japanese Entanglement" since 2016 at first in King's College London, then in SOAS, Turin and now in Venice.
During his doctoral research he has studied the interactions of Indians and Japanese from the perspectives of students, industrial experts and civil servants looking at the comparative literature they produced about the Japanese and the British empires while crossing the Indo-Japanese contact zone.
Recently he has been focusing on the relationship between Japan and the Indian Princely States uncovering a forgotten history of trans-imperial connectivity, cooperation and competition across South Asia and Japan.
Francesco is pursuing this research as part of the PRIN project at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice.
