Biography

Noelle Turtur is a historian of modern Europe and European empires. She received her doctorate from Columbia University in 2022. She studies Italian migration and imperialism primarily through the lens of business history. Her work uses Italy as a case study to examine the respective powers of the nation-states, citizens, and subjects, the different ways states exercise power beyond their borders, and the transformation of imperial power over time.
As a Max Weber Fellow, she will revise her manuscript, ‘Making Fascist Empire Work: Italian Enterprises, Labor, and Organized Community in Occupied Ethiopia, 1896-1943’. A study of enterprises in Italian East Africa, her book reveals that ‘fascist settler colonialism’ was facilitated by a violent military occupation and a disciplinary corporatist state, yet depended on the capital, labour, and knowledge of Africans, members of the Ottoman diaspora, and Italians. She is currently preparing an article on the political economy of fascist imperialism and another on the conflicts between fascist racial and corporatist hierarchies in Italian East Africa.

Noelle teaches courses about imperialism, migration, political economy, and political philosophy. As the Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Fellow at UCLA, she taught the seminar ‘Empires of Profit: Case Studies in the Co-Evolution of Imperialism and Modern Business’ and the lecture ‘Migration and the Making of Modern Europe, 1789 to the present day.’ At Columbia, Noelle taught ‘Contemporary Civilizations,’ a year-long seminar on history and philosophy.