Pisa, 8 February 2019. Two professors of Contemporary History of the Scuola Normale have been declared “Principal Investigators” for two PRIN 2017 funds (funding for research of national interest provided each year by the MIUR – the Italian Ministry of Education). Fabrizio Oppedisano, researcher in Roman History, has also been declared “Associated Investigator” in the latter sector.

Professor Ilaria Pavan was the winner for the project “The welfare-warfare nexus. The Italian experience in transnational perspective: total wars, citizenship and the transformation of the welfare state”, which has been granted € 193,000. In the wake of recent comparative studies, the project will evaluate to what extent and with what characteristics and results the two twentieth-century world wars contributed to the development of the welfare system in Italy, also in relation to the processes of the promotion of equality and the forms of distributive equity.

In the same disciplinary sector SH6 (historical sciences), 283 thousand euros were granted to Professor Silvio Pons for the project “How Communism went global. Building connections between Soviet, European, and African communists, 1920s to 1960s “. The project will be investigating the continuities between the global networks established by the Communist International in the years between the two wars and the context of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular between Moscow, the European Communists and the African Communists.

In all 37 projects have been funded by the Ministry of Education, University and Research for the SH6 sector (4 in Tuscany, half of which for “historical” projects at the Normale).

Dr. Fabrizio Oppedisano will coordinate the local unit of the Scuola Normale of the project “Ruling in hard times. Patterns of power and practices of government in the making of Carolingian Italy “, of which the national coordinator is Professor Giuseppe Albertoni of the University of Trento.