Biography

After my studies of history and literature in Berlin and Rome, I gained my M.A. (1999) and Ph.D. (2005) at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 1999-2002 I was a fellow on the Graduate Research Program Gesellschaftsvergleich in historischer, ethnologischer und soziologischer Perspektive. My Ph.D. research was sponsored by the DFG (1999-2002), the German Historical Institute in Rome (1999-2000, 2004), the Centre for Comparative History of Europe, the Istituto Trentino di Cultura (2003), and the Fazit-Stiftung (2003-2004).
The Ph.D. title was awarded by the Wolf Erich Kellner-Gedächtnisstiftung in 2005. From November 2005 until August 2006 I worked as an Assistant Professor at the FU Berlin (collaborating with Sebastian Conrad).
My current research interests and fields concern German, Italian and Mediterranean history (19C-20C); nationalism, liberalism, civil society and colonialism; political history, religious and gender history, history of media and emotions; gender and postcolonial theory; comparative and transnational history. My Ph.D. thesis analysed liberal anti-Catholicism in Germany and Italy in the period of the European Culture Wars. At the EUI I will carry out research on The European South. Colonial relations in the Mediterranean: France, Italy, Spain (1830-1975). I will focus on the Southern European regions of Andalusia, the Midi, and the Mezzogiorno which were perceived as backward within their respective nation-states, while they became dynamic crossing points of Northern Africa’s colonisation and decolonisation. In this way, European nation-building and colonialism, usually treated as independent from each other, will be reshaped as a colonial histoire croisée of Southern Europe and the Maghreb.
Recent publications: Die Massen bewegen. Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne (ed. with Frank Bösch), Frankfurt a.M./New York, 2006; Religion und Zivilgesellschaft. Zur Theorie und Geschichte ihrer Beziehung, Berlin 2005; Enemies at the Gate. The "Moabiter Klostersturm" and the "Kulturkampf": Germany, in: Christopher Clark/Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge 2003, 227-254; La "natura" del nemico: Rappresentazioni del Cattolicesimo nell’Anticlericalismo dell’Italia liberale, in: Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento 58 (2001) 117-136.