Dr Tommaso Zerbi
I am an architectural and art historian who specialises in temporality, political and religious history, and cross-cultural encounters in the modern world.
I am a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh—where I am also an Affiliate of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities—and a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. A major concern of my research and pedagogy is the entanglement of practices of past reception and revival, and attitudes towards the pre-modern built environment, with modernity’s most pressing anxieties and provocative dimensions, particularly empire, fascism, fabrications of nationhood, mission, modes of coloniality, and revolution. I have published extensively on these themes, with an emphasis on modern Italy, its former colonies and occupied territories in the African continent and the Mediterranean Basin, and Anglo-Italian relations.
My current book projects, Building the Risorgimento: Architecture, Savoy Medievalism, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Italy and The Colonial Middle Ages: Architecture, Religion, and Temporality in the Italian Empire, offer critical explorations of medievalism in the material and ontological fabrication of Italy and the Italian Empire, respectively. In foregrounding temporality as a critical framework for historical inquiry, they pioneer approaches that position the built environment as a central lens for confronting the politics of time. Stretching from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries and from Italy to Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and the Italian Dodecanese, responses to the Middle Ages are examined in their dynamic interrelations with classicism, modernism, and orientalism. Crucially, they are revealed as a critical framework through which nationhood, religion, alterity, and empire were negotiated. Far beyond these projects, I have worked extensively to advance the place of architectural and art history within medievalism studies and broader reception studies, efforts that include a seminal paper for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2019), organising conference sessions for the Society of Architectural Historians (2023 and 2025), and convening the first dedicated conference on medievalism and architecture (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, 2024).
Between completing a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 and returning to Edinburgh in 2025 as the recipient of a three-year Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, I held research fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2021), the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (2022 and 2023–2024), Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2023), and the German Historical Institute in Rome – Max Weber Foundation (2024). Prior to these, I graduated (MArch, BArch) summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano. My research has received recognition and support by the British School at Rome, the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, the Italian Embassy in London, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, among others. It has been accepted for publication in, for instance, Architectural History (Cambridge University Press), Architectural Histories, Studi e Ricerche di Storia dell’Architettura, the Journal of Art Historiography, and the Papers of the British School at Rome (Cambridge University Press).
I teach across expansive spatial and temporal horizons, engaging Europe and its encounters with the wider world, and spanning the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods while often engaging with earlier chronologies. My teaching encompasses history, theory, and historiography, and bridges the study of the material world—from the object to urbanism—with broader historical, theoretical, and historiographical questions, particularly those relating to systems of power and the establishment and challenge of the canon, in both specialist seminars and general survey courses.
Among the institutions at which I have been invited to speak are the Institute of Historical Research (London), the Academia Belgica (Rome), the German Historical Institute in Paris, the Società Romana di Storia Patria, the Ècole Française de Rome, the University of Düsseldorf, Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence), the British School at Rome, the German Historical Institute in Rome – Max Weber Foundation, and the Università di Urbino.