Maurizio ISABELLA

1968
School of History - Queen Mary, University of London
Mail : maurizio.isabella@madrid-ias.eu

 

 

Academic background and career

Dec. 2017 : Professeur Invité, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris
April-May 2016 : Chercheur Résident, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid
May-July 2015 : Visiting Fellow, Instituto Ciencias Sociais, (ICS), Lisbon
April 2015 : Visiting professor,University of Calabria, Arcavacata
April-June 2013 : Visiting Fellowship, Centre for European Studies, Harvard University
Sept. 2010 : Promoted Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Queen Mary, University of London
Dec. 2006 : Lecturer in Modern History, Queen Mary, University of London
Sept.-Nov-2006 : Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellowship in Research, Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University
Sept. 2005- Sept.2006 : Research Fellow, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, London
July -Sep.2004 : Research Associate, Centre for the Research in the Arts Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
1997 : Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge


Current researches

Isabella’s main research interests are intellectual, political and cultural history, with a focus on the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century, and on transnational connections and exchanges. Currently, he is working on a history of the 1820s revolutions of Southern Europe in global context. Isabella’s project reassesses uprisings in Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula, Sicily and Greece in the 1820s, aimed at establishing constitutions and self-government, and inaugurated by military revolts. It focuses on interconnections and exchanges across and beyond the region during the revolutions, looking at the movement of volunteers, travelers, information and ideas between the revolutions, and from Northern Europe and other continents into the Mediterranean.

It explores practices and ideas that shaped these revolutions, and their legacies in the region. In particular, it looks at the role played by secret societies, elections, the experience of war mobilization as well as circulation of information and printed material in politicizing new sectors of society. It focuses also on constitutional culture and the ways in which debates about the theory and practice of a constitutional government defined revolutionary thought.

By so doing, it will shed new light on the origins and nature of early Southern European liberalism, its peculiarities, and its relationship with debates in the rest of Europe and outside it. It will locate them in the context of a global revolutionary South extending from Latin America to Asia. By highlighting the importance of this revolutionary wave, the project will revise our understanding of the age of revolutions, so far almost exclusively understood as centering around the North Atlantic and France, and help us to rethink the origins of political modernity in Europe.


Principal publications

Monographs
- 2016 With Konstantina Zanou (eds.), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politic and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury Publishing (jointly authored introduction and chapter, and single authored chapter, see details below), pp.240
- 2011 Italian translation of my Risorgimento in Exile, as Risorgimento in Esilio, Roma-Bari, Laterza
-2009 Risorgimento in Exile, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009

Articles
- 2017 “Liberalismo e globalizzazione”,in “Dalla storia dell’Impero alla World History. L’itinerario storiografico di Christopher A. Bayly”, Passato e Presente, (3000 words)
- 2015 “Citizens or Faithful? Religion and the Liberal Revolutions of the 1820s in Southern Europe”, Modern Intellectual History, forum on “Global Liberalisms”, (Glenda Sluga and Timothy Rowse eds.), pp.1-24. (10000 words)
- 2013: "Aristocratic Liberalism and Risorgimento: Cesare Balbo and Piedmontese Political Thought after 1848”, History of European Ideas, pp.835-857. (13000 words)
- 2012: “Rethinking Italy’s Nation building 150 years afterwards: the New Risorgimento Historiography”, Past and Present, pp.247-268 (10000 words)
- 2012 Guest editor of special issue the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, “Nationality before Liberty? Risorgimento Political Thought in Transnational Context”, with articles by John Robertson ,Gareth Stedman Jones, Jeremy Jennings, Anthony Howe, Carlo Capra, Georgios Varouxakis, Martin Thom, Roberto Romani, Francesca Sofia
- 2012 “ Introduction” to “Nationality before Liberty?”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, pp.507-515. (3500 words)
- 2012 “Freedom of the Press, Public Opinion and Liberalism in the Risorgimento”, in “Nationality before Liberty?”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, pp.551-567. (7000 words)
- 2011 “Da funzionario napoleonico a liberale europeo: Giuseppe Pecchio (1785-1835)”, Archivio Storico Lombardo, CLXXIX, pp.25-44 (7000 words)

Book chapter
- 2016 With Konstantina Zanou, “Introduction: The Sea, its People and their Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century”, in Isabella and Zanou (eds.), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politic and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury Publishing, pp.1-22.(7500 words)
- 2016 “Mediterranean Liberals? Italian Revolutionaries and the Making of a Colonial Sea 1800-1830”, in Isabella and Zanou (eds.), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury publisher, pp.75-94. (8500 words)
- 2016 With Artan Puto, “From Southern Italy to Instanbul: Trajectories of Albanian Nationalism in the Writings of Girolamo De Rada and Shemseddin Sami Frasheri 1848-1903 ca” in Mediterranean Diasporas, pp.169-185 (7000 words)
- 2016 « Citoyens ou fidèles? Religion et révolutions libérales dans l’Europe méridionale des années 1820 », in Jean-Claude Caron and Jean-Philippe Luis (eds.), Rien appris, rien oublié ? Les restaurations dans l’Europe postnapolonienne (1814-1830), Presses Universitaries de Rennes, pp.257-270 (7000 words, abridged version of my article in Modern Intellectual History)
- 2013 “Entangled patriotisms: the Italian diaspora and Spanish America”, in G. Paquette and M. Brown (eds.) Connections after Colonialism. Europe and Latin America in the 1820s, (Alabama U. Press), pp.87-107. (9000 words) - 2012 “Liberalism and Empire in the Mediterranean. The View-Point of the Risorgimento”, in Patriarca and Riall (eds.), The Risorgimento Revisited, pp.232-254, (London, Palgrave MacMillan), pp.232-254, (10 000 words)
- 2012 “Liberalismo e Imperi nel Mediterraneo: Il punto di vista del Risorgimento”, in Domenico Maria Bruni ed., Libertà e modernizazione. La cultura politica del liberalismo risorgimentale, Milan, Guerini, pp.203-232, (10000 words), Italian translation of the English original essay)
- 2012 “Il movimento risorgimentale in un contesto globale”, in A. Roccucci (ed.), La costruzione dello stato nazione in Italia, Proceedings of the SISSCO Conference, Cagliari, October 2010 , (Roma, Viella), pp.79-100, (10000 words)
- 2012 “Giuseppe Pecchio”, Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero: economia, Enciclopedia Treccani (3500 words)
- 2011 “Esilio” in Atlante Culturale del Risorgimento, Alberto Banti, Antonio Chiavistelli, Luca Mannori and Marco Meriggi (eds.), (Bari-Roma, Laterza), pp.65-74. (3500 words)
- 2010 “Interlocking Patriotisms: Italy and England in the Long nineteenth century”, in exhibition catalogue on “The Pre-raphaelites and Italy”, (Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall eds.), Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. (An Italian version also published for the catalogue of the same exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Ravenna), 4500 words)

 

PODCASTS
01/03/2022 - Espagnol