Bio 

Anna Mahera is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Ioannina. Her research examines the making of modern Europe through the interconnected histories of political economy, technology, state formation and historiography.

Her work approaches liberalism, protectionism and economic policy not simply as doctrinal debates but as historically situated languages of governance that structured social hierarchies, labour regimes and conceptions of citizenship. At the same time, she analyses infrastructure and engineering expertise as political practices, highlighting the role of technocracy and material systems in the consolidation of modern states.

A central concern of her scholarship is the relationship between economic rationalities and social transformation. Industrialization, labour organization and urban space are studied as sites where economic structures intersected with gendered orders, social conflict and new forms of collective identity. By integrating labour history and gender history into the study of political economy, her work foregrounds the social dimensions of modernization.

Mahera’s research is equally engaged with historiography and the production of historical knowledge. She examines how key moments such as the French Revolution or 1917 have been constructed, interpreted and mobilized, and how historical narratives participate in broader struggles over legitimacy, memory and political meaning. Her interest in public history extends this inquiry to the uses of the past in contemporary public discourse and commemorative practice.

Methodologically, her scholarship combines archival research with historiographical and conceptual analysis. Moving between France, Greece and the wider Mediterranean context, she approaches modern Europe as a historically constructed space shaped by transnational circulations of ideas, capital and expertise.

Across these fields, her work is guided by a common question: how do economic systems, technological infrastructures and political institutions co-produce modern forms of social order — and how are these processes rendered intelligible through historical writing?