Biography

I am a political theorist and intellectual historian, working mainly on Italian political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. I currently serve as an assistant professor in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Tokyo.

I obtained my PhD from University College London in July 2013. My thesis, ‘Antonio Gramsci as an Italian Revolutionary: Gramsci’s Marxism and the Crisis of Italian Revolutionary’, explores a tension in Gramsci between his concrete analysis and grounded reforms of Italian politics and his Marxist proposals for social transformation, while rejecting the normally accepted account of him as either a forerunner of radical democracy or as a progressive totalitarian.

At Waseda, I run first-year seminars and teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses, such as introduction to politics, the history of political thought and political theory. I join the Max Weber Programme from 1 March to 31 August 2015, on exceptional leave from Waseda University.

At the EUI, while transforming my thesis into a monograph, I will start revisiting the idea of modernity by focusing on how three eminent Italian thinkers – Croce, Gramsci and Gobetti – projected differing views of modernity that informed their alternative visions of the Italian state. This research will shed new light on the character of modernity that encourages alternative visions of society to emerge. I am also interested in applying upshots of global and transnational history to the history of thought, in order to broaden the scope of my research about the idea of modernity.