About Me

Hello and welcome to my personal website.

I am an associate professor of environmental history at the Centre for History of the Paris Institute of Political Studies.

My first book, entitled Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy (Berghahn Books 2015) investigated the role of earthquakes as agents of urban and regional change, by looking at the 1908 earthquake in Messina and the 1968 earthquake in the Belice Valley, Sicily.  Fault Lines was awarded the 2015 Book Prize of the American Association for Italian Studies and the 2016 Anci-Storia Book Prize and was shortlisted for the SISSCO (Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea) “Opera Prima” and the Turku Book Prize of the European Society for Environmental History. 

I am working on a second book investigating the extraordinary intensification of water use and control in the Po Valley of Italy from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Early findings of this project have appeared in Environment and History (2017), Technology and Culture (2018), and Water History (2021).

I have also led collaborative projects on the history of the water sciences, the environmental history of the coasts of Mediterranean Europe, on the environmental history of river sediment and the shrinking Po, Ebro ,and Rhone river deltas, and on the interdisciplinary study of rivers and society. These projects have led to published and forthcoming articles and edited collections.

I hold a Ph.D. in history, geography, and law from the University of Siena (2011) and a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) in history from the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne (2023). Before joining Sciences Po, I was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, and a Marie Curie Fellow at  Louisiana State University, Department of Geography & Anthropology, and at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna. Between 2016 and 2019 I held a Chair of Excellence in Environmental History at the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité.

You can find me online on Bluesky and LinkedIn.