Contributors

Daniel Banks is a PhD Researcher in the department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute. He works on the circulation of revolutionaries in the western Mediterranean in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and the effects this had on political events occurring around the sea's shores. More generally, he is interested in how a focus on mobility can help to rewrite national political narratives. His current research project is entitled, “The Floating Revolution: Revolutionary Mobilities, Organization, and Practices in the Western Mediterranean, circa 1856–1875.”

David I. Kertzer is the Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science at Brown University where he is also Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies and, from 2006 to 2011 served as Provost. His book, The Pope and Mussolini, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and has been published in eleven languages. Among his many other books, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction and has been published in eighteen foreign editions. His articles in the fields of European political, social, demographic, and religious history have appeared in many academic journals and in recent years he has published a series of articles on the Vatican, Fascism, World War II, and the Jews in The Atlantic. Kertzer co-founded and served for many years as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He served as president of both the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. In 2005 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Kertzer's latest book, The Pope at War, tells the story of the controversial Pius XII’s relations with Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War. Editions have appeared in the U.S., Italy, Germany, and the UK, and are scheduled soon to appear in Spain, Russia, and China.

Deidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. Her books include the prize-winning The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998), Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015), the edited collections Cultural Institutions of the Novel (1996, co-edited with William B. Warner), Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000), and, most recently, The Unfinished Book (2021, co-edited with Alexandra Gillespie). She is currently completing Paper Slips: A Literary and Media History of Scrap — on the tension between the loose leaf and the whole book that is hardwired into modern cultures of paper and print. This project traces how practices centred on scraps — collaging, commonplacing, recycling, scavenging, gleaning — can call into question the primacy of notions of originality and authorial property that usually organize our accounts of modern literature and art. 

Massimo Riva is a Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. He is the author of four books, published in Italy, on melancholy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, and the future of literature in the digital age. His publications in English include Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction (2007) and the Cambridge edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity (co-edited with F. Borghesi and M. Papio, 2013). Since the late 1990s, his pioneering work in the digital humanities has led to the creation of award-winning projects, including the Decameron Web, the recipient of two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Virtual Humanities Lab, recipient of a two-year NEH grant; and the Garibaldi Panorama and the Risorgimento Archive, recipient of a Digital Innovation award from the American Council of Learned Societies. For his engagement with research-based teaching, he was named Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence. His born-digital monograph, Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World, was by Stanford University Press (2022) and is the winner of a 2023 PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers.

Simeon А. Simeonov is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Balkan Studies and Center of Thracology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IBSCT–BAS). He is interested in the history of international relations in the “long” nineteenth century. His scholarship focuses on consular relations in the Age of Revolutions, and his methodology draws impulses from “new diplomatic history,” “entangled” history, and theories of international relations. His works examine the role of empire-building, slavery, colonialism, and decolonization in the process of global integration.