The Association for Political History welcomes Prof. Dr. Carlotta Sorba as new member to the Board.

Carlotta Sorba (1959) is Professor in Contemporary European History within the Department of History, Geography and the Ancient world at the University of Padua, Italy. She obtained her first degree in Blogna and er PhD in Turin. Since 2012 she is the director of the CSC (Interuniversity Center of Cultural History) founded by a convention between the University of Padua, Bologna, Venice, Pisa and Verona.

Sorba is a cultural historian of 19th-century Europe with special reseach interests on the relationship between cultural productions (music, theatre, proto-mass culture), society and politics. She has published intensively on Italian and European 19th-century history and particularly on theatre as a physical, social and imaginative space and as the breeding ground of social and cultural representations.

Material culture of politics

Her current research focuses on the material culture of politics (objects and clothing) during the 19th century. Sorba is working on a collective volume on political objects in 19th-century Europe. and a special issue of the journal Contemporanea on ‘The clothing of politics: dress, appearances and political identities (XIXth-XXth centuries’.

Recent publications

Recent publications are Il melodramma della nazione. Politica e sentimenti nell’eta del Risorgimento (Rome: Laterza 2015), which focused on the relationship between melodramatic imagination and national movement in the Italian Risorgimento. The book was awarded the Senior Prize 2016 from the Italian Society of studies on contemporary history.