Dr Fernanda Gallo

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.