Dr Fernanda Gallo
BA MA PHD
Associate Professor in History and Politics
Fellow and Director of Studies in History and Politics


I am an historian of Modern Italy and the Mediterranean with a particular interest in transnational intellectual exchanges across the Mediterranean and the interconnections between Northern and Southern European political thought in the long nineteenth century.
My first book, Dalla patria alla Stato. Bertrando Spaventa, una biografia intellettuale (Laterza, 2013) [From Patria to the State: an Intellectual Biography of Bertrando Spaventa] looks at the intellectual biography of the main exponent of nineteenth-century Italian Hegelianism, focusing in particular on the political context of the Risorgimento from 1810s to 1880s.
My second monograph, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2024), is the story of a generation of intellectuals and politicians born at the start of the nineteenth century, the majority of them from Southern Italy, who experienced the collapse of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of Southern Italy, and who helped to forge modern Italian political thought. The book traces the reception and transformation of Hegel's ideas in Italy and how they were reworked into political practices.
I am currently working on my new project on the revolutions in Southern Europe between 1780s and 1860s (Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal), exploring the interconnections between constitutions, liberalism and imperial dominations in the region from a gender perspective.
For undergraduates, in Part I, Dr Gallo lectures for paper 17 (19th-century European history) and paper 18 (20th-century European history), and in Part II, I teach the Specified Subject "Rethinking Europe from the Mediterranean shores, 1796-1914" (paper 24). She supervises for papers 17, 18, 19 and 20.
At the MPhil level, she teaches an option on 'The Modern Mediterranean' for the Modern European and World History MPhils.
Appointed by the Italian Minister of Cultural Activities as a member of the National Committee for the celebration of the Bicentenary of the birth of Bertrando Spaventa (1817-2017
Key publications
with Axel Körner, ‘Challenging Intellectual Hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento Political Thought: An Introduction', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 24/2 (2019).
‘The Rise of the Ethical State in Italy: Neapolitan Hegelians and Risorgimento Political Thought, 1848-1876’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 24/2 (2019).
‘The Shaping of European Modernities: The Renaissance and the Neapolitan Hegelianism, 1848- 1862’, History, 103/356 (2018)
Other publications
'La costruzione dell’identità nazionale e le interpretazioni del Rinascimento nell’hegelismo napoletano', in G. Vacca and M. Musté (eds.), 'Bertrando Spaventa tra coscienza nazionale e filosofia europea', Rome, Viella, 2018
‘La sfida alla “Supremazia Protestante”: Le origini della modernità e l’Hegelismo napoletano’, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, n. 3, 2017
‘Gli Hegeliani di Napoli e il Risorgimento. Bertrando Spaventa e Francesco De Sanctis a confronto, 1848-1862’, LEA. Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, n. 6, 2017
‘Francesco De Sanctis interprete del Rinascimento’, Rivista di Letteratura italiana, n. 1, 2017
‘Philosophical revolution and the shaping of European consciousness: Bertrando Spaventa’s “La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea”’, Phenomenology and Mind, n. 8, 2015
Ethos Repubblicano e Pensiero Meridiano [Republican Ethos and Meridian Thought], edited with F. Frediani Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2011
‘Introduzione: Ethos Repubblicano e Pensiero Meridiano’, with F. Frediani, in F. Gallo and F. Frediani (eds.), Ethos Repubblicano e Pensiero Meridiano, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2011.
‘Dalla religione civile al sentimento religioso: il Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri di Benjamin Constant, in F. Gallo and F. Frediani Ethos repubblicano e pensiero meridiano, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2011
‘Dialogo intorno all’educazione civica’, in R. Forlenza and I. Belloni, Questioni civiche. Forme, simboli e confini della cittadinanza, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2010
Faculty Of History

