Biography
Raffaele Danna received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2021 with his dissertation ‘The Spread of Hindu-Arabic Numerals in the European Tradition of Practical Arithmetic: a Socio-Economic Perspective (13th–16th centuries)’.
Raffaele is interested in studying how the embodied circulation of knowledge contributes to economic, scientific, and technological change. During his PhD, he focused on the diffusion among European practitioners of Hindu-Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), reconstructing both an economic history and a social history of mathematics.
Before joining the EUI, Raffaele worked at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, where he contributed as an applied economist to the Horizon 2020 project ReCreating Europe. His research has been supported by, among others, the Cambridge Trust, the Faculty of History (University of Cambridge), the Economic History Society, and the Cambridge Political Economy Society.
As a Max Weber Fellow, he will complete the publication of his first monograph. Meanwhile, he will work on a number of publications related to his PhD, and will start designing a new research project at the intersection of economic history, and the history of science and technology.
In Cambridge, Raffaele taught late medieval history and historical methods, and contributed to courses on the history of capitalism, economic history, and the history of accounting in Pisa and Bologna.