Dr Maurizio Isabella
Senior Lecturer in History
Location: Arts Two 3.30email: m.isabella@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7882 2862
Maurizio Isabella was educated at the University of Milan, where he studied Italian literature and Modern History. He then went on to take a Masters’ degree in European Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he also obtained his doctoral degree in 1998. After a stage at the European Commission, Maurizio worked for five years in Brussels, first as Assistant to the Secretary General of UNICE, the representation of European Industry to the European Institutions, and then as consultant and political analyst advising companies and trade associations on European policies.
In 2004 he visited CRASSH, the Centre for the Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University, and has been Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, London, where he has taught Modern European History. In 2006, he held the Stanley J Seeger fellowship with the Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University. Dr Isabella is a member of the Queen Mary Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought.
Research interests:
Dr. Isabella’s research focuses on the political thought and the intellectual and cultural history of the Risorgimento. He is particularly interested in the study of international intellectual history in the nineteenth century, and in the relationship between European and Italian political thought ad nationalism. Maurizio’s Risorgimento in Exile, published by Oxford University press in 2009, studies exile in early nineteenth century as an intellectual experience, and assesses early Italian liberalism and patriotism as part of transatlantic and pan-European ideological currents.
Risorgimento in Exile was named proxime accessit to the Gladstone Prize, the award of the Royal Historical Society for the best first history book in non-British history for year 2009.
Current projects include the study of the relationship between Italian liberalism and European attitudes to empire in the nineteenth century, and the political thought of the Italian moderates.
Read the Comments on the book by the Gladstone Prize Judges’ citation.
Postgraduate supervision:
Dr. Isabella is interested in supervising research in any aspect of nineteenth-century Italian history, especially in the broad field of intellectual and cultural history, and in the intellectual exchanges within the Mediterranean and between the Mediterranean and the rest of the world in the same period.
Publications:
Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era, Oxford University Press, (Oxford 2009)see review in the Corriere della Sera.
‘“Apostles of the nation and pilgrims of freedom”: Religious representations of Exile between Europe and the Italian Risorgimento’, in K. Heinsohn S. Leichnacht and (eds.), Diaspora Identities: Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism Past and Present, (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2009), pp.68-92
“Emotions, rationality and intentionality in patriotic discourse”, in “Alberto Banti’s interpretationm of Risorgimento nationalism: a debate”, Nation and Nationalism, June 2009, 427-33
“Mazzini’s Internationalism in Context: From the Cosmopolitan patriotism of the Italian Carbonari to Mazzini’s Europe of the Nations”, in E. Biagini and C. Bayly (eds.), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, Proceedings of the British Academy, (Oxford Un. Press, 2008), pp.37-58
“Exile and Nationalism: the case of the Italian Risorgimento”, European History Quarterly, 2006
“Riformismo settecentesco e Risorgimento: l’opera di Petro Verri ed il pensiero economico italiano della prima metà dell’ottocento” Pensiero Economico Italiano, XIII, n.1, 2005
“Il Conciliatore e l’Inghilterra”, in Il Conciliatore, Atti del Congresso di Gargnano, Università di Milano, Gennaro Barbarisi ed, (Milan, 2004)
The Italian exiles and British Politics before and after 1848, in Sabine Freitag ed, Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in mid-victorian England, Berghahm, (Oxford-New York, 2003)
Italy, 1760-1815, in Hanna Barker and Simon Burrows eds, Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America 1760-1820, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge, 2002)
Undergraduate teaching:
Europe since 1890 (Level 1)
Italy from Napoleon to Berlusconi (Level 2)
Challenging Europe's Political and Social Order: The 1848 Revolutions (Level 2)