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Roberta Biasillo is assistant professor in contemporary political history at Utrecht University. She earned a PhD in modern European history at the University of Bari. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and the European University Institute in Florence. Her research interests lie at the confluence of environmental history and political history. She has focused on the roles of marginal environments embedded in Italian nineteenth-century liberalism and African colonial environments in shaping Italian fascism. Her coauthored volume Mussolini’s Nature: An Environmental History of Fascism is forthcoming from MIT Press. She is working on a research project on the global environmental history of colonial Libya.
RCC Research Project: From Soil to Oil: Colonial Ecologies of Libya
Selected Publications:
- Una storia ambientale delle Paludi pontine: Terracina dall’Unità alla bonifica integrale (1871–1928). Rome: Viella, 2023. Forthcoming.
- with Marco Armiero, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.
- “Geographical Exploration via the Environmental Humanities: Decolonising Approaches to Space.” In Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments: From the Arctic to the Mountaintops, edited by Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Stefano Morosini, 157–175. London: Routledge, 2022.
- “Socio-Ecological Colonial Transfers: Trajectories of the Fascist Agricultural Enterprise in Libya (1922–43).” Modern Italy 26, no. 2 (2021): 181–198. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2021.7.
- with Claiton Marcio da Silva. “The Very Grounds Underlying Twentieth-Century Authoritarian Regimes: Building Soil Fertility in Italian Libya and the Brazilian Cerrado.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 2 (2021): 366–399. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000086.
- with Marco Armiero. “The Transformative Potential of a Disaster: A Contextual Analysis of the 1882 Flood in Verona, Italy.” Journal of Historical Geography 66 (2019): 69–80.