Hello and welcome to my personal website!
I am an assistant professor of environmental history at the Centre for history of the Paris Institute of Political Studies. My first book, entitled Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy (Berghahn Books 2015) investigates if and how earthquakes influence urban historical change, by looking at the 1908 earthquake in Messina and the 1968 earthquake in the Belice Valley, Sicily. Fault Lines has been awarded the 2015 Book Prize of the American Association for Italian Studies and the 2016 Anci-Storia Book Prize. I am writing a new book in which I investigate the entwined history of water, state, and capital in the Po Valley, Italy, from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Articles in English from this project have appeared in Environment and History (2017) and in Technology and Culture (2018). Over the last few years, I have also been researching the environmental history of the coasts of Mediterranean Europe and I am currently PI of a collaborative project on the environmental history of sediment and the shrinking Po, Ebro and Rhone river deltas during the twentieth century. I hold a Ph.D. in history, geography and law from the University of Siena (2011). Prior to 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. Between 2016 and 2019 I held Chair of Excellence in Environmental History at the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité.
Please click here for a (fairly) recent version of my CV.
Giacomo Parrinello 