John A. Davis

Professor Emeritus

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D.Phil., Oxford
Emiliana Pasca Noether Professor of Modern Italian History, Emeritus
Editor, Journal of Modern Italian Studies

Areas of Specialty
Italian History, 1700 to the present; Comparative European Social and Economic History since 1750

Current Research Interests
Italy’s North-South relations since Unification
The Risorgimento in Mediterranean context
Romanticism, Liberty and Nationalism: the Revolutions of the 1820s in Italy and Spain

Biography
A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, Davis has received the Serena Medal of the British Academy and the International Galileo Galilei Prize in recognition of his contributions to modern Italy history. A Resident of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London) and a member of the academic board of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, he has taught and lectured at numerous universities in Italy and Europe as well as the USA. He is general editor of the seven volume Oxford Short History of Italy (Oxford University Press 2000-2006) and has edited many  collective volumes, including Italy and America 1943-4(Napoli, Cittá del Sole 1997). His publications include Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy in the Age of the European Revolutions (Oxford University Press 2006 – Italian edition Rubbettino Editore 2013), which won the Howard and Helen Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book on Italy in any period (2007), the Premio Internazionale Sele d’Oro and the Literary  Award of the International Napoleonic Society.  His book, The Jews of San Nicandro, was published by Yale University Press (October 2010) and has been published in Italian by La Giuntina (Firenze 2013). He is currently working on Italy’s  ‘Southern Question’ from Unification to the present’ and on the liberal revolutions of the 1820s in Italy and Spain.

Appointments
NEH-AAR Summer Seminar July 2013: Co-Director with David I. Kertzer (Brown University) NEH summer seminar on Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento: New Perspectives on Unification at the American Academy in Rome (Italy).

Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies (IEA), Paris, France February-June 2013.

Astor Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford (UK) Spring 2013.

Selected Publications
The Jews of San Nicandro (Yale University Press, 2010) – Italian Edition Gli Ebrei di San Nicandro (La Giuntina, Firenze  2013)

Naples & Napoleon: The European Revolutions in Southern Italy 1750-1860 (Oxford University Press, 2006: Paperback edition 2008). Italian Edition (Rubbettino Editore,  2013)

Introduction to Pietro Colletta History of the Kingdom of Naples (Edinburgh 1859 facsimile edition)  (I B Tauris, London 2009)

John A Davis & Giovanni Capuano (eds) The Hamilton Letters : The Naples dispatches of Sir William Hamilton (IB Tauris 2008)

‘Italy’ in Robert J Goldstein (ed) The Frightful Stage. Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth century Europe (Berghahn Press, New York 2009) 190-227

‘Il Sud e la Questione Meridionale dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale’ in Stuart Woolf (ed) L’Italia Repubblicana vista da fuori (il Mulino, Bologna 2007) 339-380

Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, ed. with P. Ginsborg, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Conflict and Control: Law and Order in 19th Century Italy (Humanities Press, 1989)

Merchants, Monopolists and Contractors: Economy and Society in Bourbon Naples 1815-60 (New York: Arno Press, 1982)

Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution (London: Croon Helm, 1979)