Research

Themes

• European Integration History: I am working on three main projects in this field. By June 2019 I will have completed the third edition of European Integration: A Concise History. The new edition will be updated to take into account events since 2012, notably Brexit, but several existing chapters will be significantly re-written and the 2011 edition's interpretative revisionism will be accentuated. I am also working on two edited collections. I shall be guest editor of the 2019 edition of the German Yearbook of Contemporary History, whose theme is European integration. Together with Daniele Pasquinucci of the University of Siena, I have also assembled a group of scholars from across Europe to produce a volume entitled Euroscepticisms: The Historical Roots of a Political Challenge. The book will be submitted for peer review to Brill Publishers of Amsterdam for publication in their series on European Studies in the fall of 2018. I am contributing a chapter on "The origins of Brexit: Enoch Powell, Douglas Jay, and the British Tradition of Foreign Policy Dissent."
• Early Cold War History in Britain: Since 2013, off and on, I have been researching the topic of dissent from the foreign policy of the Labour government, 1945-1951. This project has led to the production of a draft article on the visit of Henry A. Wallace to Britain in April 1947 and its significance for the early Cold War. I intend this project to lead to a short monograph on the Labour Left's opposition to the foreign policy of Ernest Bevin or to further research articles.
• Early Cold War History in Italy: I have begun working -- but this project is at embryo stage -- on the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Stalin. The theme, once again, will be dissent -- though this time, dissent suppressed. Essentially, I aim to write a detailed account of opposition within the PCI to the pro-Soviet position of its leadership, 1947-1956. This project will lead, inevitably, into a wider project on the representation of Stalin and Stalinism in the PCI's publications and propaganda subsequent to 1956. More in general, I am interested in the birth of Italian democracy in the broader period 1943-1956.
• Contemporary Italian Populism: Together with Marco Brunazzo of Trento University, I have been working since 2016 on the attitudes towards the EU of Italy's two chief populist movements, the Movimento Cinque Stelle and the Lega. This project represents something of a departure for me. But Italy's populist turn is something that needs historical explanation and I am happy to work on the subject with an empirical political scientist who is open to historical approaches.

Recent Conference Papers

• “The Origins of Brexit: Enoch Powell, Douglas Jay, and British Tradition,” at the workshop conference “The 50^th Anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech,” Sciences Po Lille, 26 January 2018.
• “The Eurocentrism of Narratives of European Integration,” at the workshop conference “Narrating Crisis: Mapping the Contested Terrain of Normative Meaning,” University of Trento, 13─14 October 2017.
• “Progressive Diplomacy: Henry A. Wallace’s Visit to Britain in the Spring of 1947 in the Context of British Debates on European Reconstruction,” at the workshop conference “Parliaments, the Executive and Foreign Policy in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives,” University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 19 June 2017.
• “The Politics of Glibness: The Eurosceptic Turn of the Lega Nord,” with Marco Brunazzo, at the conference “Current Populism in Europe,” organized by Charles University, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, and the Goethe Institute, Prague, 23–24 May, 2016.

Video Lectures