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I am an intellectual, cultural, and religious historian of early modern and modern Europe, and I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Haverford College. Before coming to Haverford, I spent two years at Yale University as a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Humanities.
I was born in Rome to an Italian father and a Venezuelan mother, and I earned BA and MA degrees in History from both the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where I received intensive interdisciplinary research training from my first day as a freshman. During my time in Pisa, I began to explore the political cultures and the intellectual and religious history of eighteenth-century Italy, from the Enlightenment to the Age of Revolutions. In 2016, I came to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in History at Fordham University. At Fordham, my interests turned transnational, then global. My dissertation, which I defended in July 2022, studied Catholic political thought in the Age of Revolutions and received the dissertation awards of the Society for French Historical Studies and of the American Catholic Historical Association. My first book, The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780-1849, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2025. The Invention of Catholicism draws on sources from more than ten European and Latin American countries to offer an intellectual history of Catholicism in the Age of Revolutions. It studies the transoceanic networks of counterrevolutionary Catholics who, as revolutions wreaked havoc on both shores of the Atlantic, transformed Catholicism into something fundamentally new – so new that writers began to use a word hardly ever heard before, "Catholicism," to indicate what had traditionally been called "the Catholic religion." This new Catholicism was no longer merely a set of theological doctrines, but also an ideological discourse about politics and society that mobilized the masses against the secularizing forces of revolutions, and could compete with other emerging ideologies – liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, socialism – in the marketplace of ideas. By redefining the nature of religion, the movement I term "the Catholic Counterrevolution" reshaped the political landscape in modern Europe and Latin America. I have published over fifteen articles and book chapters in English and Italian. My recent publications include an article that challenges the traditional narrative of opposition between the French Revolution and the Catholic church (Modern Intellectual History, 2020), which received an honorable mention from the Society for Italian Historical Studies; a chapter, coauthored with Charles Walton (University of Warwick), for the Cambridge History of Rights, which discusses the origins of social rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and an article in Studi storici, which reinterprets the fascination of Romantic Catholics with the Middle Ages as a form of future-oriented historical sociology. My most recent work, currently under review, explore the emergence of a new charismatic papacy in the Age of Revolutions, offering a fresh perspective on the links between religion, celebrity, and political charisma. My teaching experience spans both early modern and modern Europe as well as the sweep of Western intellectual history. I have taught introductory classes on early modern and modern European history, intellectual history seminars, and classes in the history of political, historical, and philosophical thought as part of Yale's Directed Studies program, a year-long set of interdisciplinary seminars for freshmen. The courses I am offering at Haverford cover the history of conspiracy theories, the Age of Revolutions, the history of Christianity, and human rights. I live in Wilmington, DE with my wife and our rescue cat, Ophelia. |
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