Hello and welcome to my personal website.
I am an associate professor of environmental history at the Centre for History at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies.
My first book, titled Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy (Berghahn Books 2015) investigated the role of earthquakes as agents of urban and regional change by looking at the 1908 earthquake in Messina and the 1968 earthquake in the Belice Valley, Sicily. Fault Lines was awarded the 2015 Book Prize of the American Association for Italian Studies and the 2016 Anci-Storia Book Prize and was shortlisted for the SISSCO (Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea) “Opera Prima” and the Turku Book Prize of the European Society for Environmental History.
My second book, titled Rivers at Work: An Environmental History of the Po Valley since 1800, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It investigates the role of rivers in powering the development of Italy’s economic powerhouse, looking at rivers’ use in both agriculture and energy production from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. Early findings of this project have appeared in Environment and History (2017), Technology and Culture (2018), and Water History (2021).
I have also led collaborative projects on the history of the water sciences, the coasts of Mediterranean Europe, river sediment and the shrinking Po, Ebro, and Rhône river deltas, and the interdisciplinary study of rivers and society. These projects have led to published and forthcoming articles and edited collections, including an edited book titled Rivers on the Move: Waterways in Human Life from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene, forthcoming with Duke University Press.
I hold a Ph.D. in history, geography, and law from the University of Siena (2011) and a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) in history from the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne (2023). Before joining Sciences Po, I was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, and a Marie Curie Fellow at Louisiana State University, Department of Geography & Anthropology, and at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna. From 2016 to 2019, I held a Chair of Excellence in Environmental History at Université Sorbonne Paris Cité.
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