Maurizio Isabella
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Maurizio Isabella is professor of Modern History in the School of Society and the Environment, Department of History, at Queen Mary University of London.
He studied at the Universities of Milan and Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD in 2000. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Calabria, Arcavacata (2015), at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris (2017), and at the Scuola Superiore of the University of Catania (2022).
He has held research fellowships at CRASSH (2004), Birkbeck (2005), Princeton (2006) and the Centre for European Studies at Harvard (2013), at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), Lisbon (2015), and at the Casa Velázquez, Madrid (2016). Between 2017 and 2018, he held an EURIAS mobility grant at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Madrid, and in autumn 2018, he was awarded the Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute.
In September 2026, Maurizio Isabella joins the Paris IAS for a ten-month research stay.
Research topics
Global History; connected history; history of the age of revolutions; intellectual history.
A world in Turmoil. Contesting Authority in the Age of Revolutions
The project seeks to offer a global account of all the ways in which authority was contested in the period between 1800 and the 1860s. It aims to go beyond narratives centred exclusively on the North Atlantic and Western Europe as spaces where popular demands for change emerged. It does so by looking at peasant and slave rebellions, military uprisings, urban riots, civil wars, counterrevolutions, royalist uprisings and anti-colonial resistance inside and at that the margins of empires. The project aims to bridge the existing gap between scholarship focussing either only on Europe or on extra-European spaces.
By focussing on old and new empires as key spaces of circulation of ideas and practices, the project’s hypothesis is that renegotiations of social and racial hierarchies took on a variety of different forms and meanings that cannot be reduced to Western notions of democratic freedoms and universal emancipation. By studying comparatively and thematically events unfolding in geographical spaces still treated separately by historians, the project seeks to offer an account of forgotten or alternative paths to popular participation and sovereignty. It therefore helps rethinking the meaning of emancipation historically in relationship to the contemporary world, at a time when calls for universal rights are in crisis, and incompatible notions of freedom and privilege are upheld by specific groups opposed to each other.
Key publications
Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolution, Princeton University Press, 2023, pp.704
DOI: 10.1017/S0067237823000772
Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016, pp.240
DOI: 10.1177/0265691416674402t
Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.284.
DOI: 10.1177/0265691411417598u
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