Louis A. Cretella

Adjunct Professor

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Ph.D., University of Connecticut

Areas of Specialty

Nineteenth Century Europe; Twentieth Century Europe; European Diplomatic Relations; Modern Italy

Current Research Interests

Origins of war; interwar years, fascism; modern Italy

Biography, Selected Publications, and Philosophy of History

Lou Cretella has taught at the regional campuses of the University of Connecticut for over forty years. He earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Connecticut, an M.A. in European History from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and a B.A. from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield.  He received a Fulbright for doctoral research on Italy’s diplomatic efforts to secure British support for Italian expansion in Turkey after World War I.  The dissertation was subsequently awarded the “Best Unpublished Manuscript by a Younger Scholar” by the Society for Italian Historical Studies.

While teaching as an adjunct, Lou also held upper management positions in the circulation departments of several daily and Sunday newspapers in Connecticut. After leaving the newspaper industry in 2006, he taught Advanced Placement courses in European History, United States History, and American Government for the Archdiocese of Hartford from 2007-2018.  At UConn, he has taught Western Traditions, World History, Modern Italy, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe, and Personality and Power in the Twentieth Century.  His courses consider change over time within the framework of modernization and are designed to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills through analysis of primary and reliable secondary source materials.

The following publications are based on research carried out in the Italian Foreign Ministry and Central State Archives:

“A Lost Opportunity:  Italian Banks and Anatolian Railroads in 1920,” Risorgimento, I, no. 3 (1980), 333-352.

Essays on “Carlo Sforza” and “Vittorio Scialoja” in Warren F. Kuehl, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists.  Westport:  Greenwood Press, 1983.

“Italian Revisionism in the Near Eastern Question, 1919-1923,” in Enrico Decleva and Alessandro Migliazza, eds., Diplomazia e storia delle relazioni internazionali:  Studi in onore di Enrico Serra.  Milan:  1989.

Italo-British Relations in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1919-1923:  The View from Rome. New York: Garland Press, 1991.