About

Dr Ilaria Scaglia is Senior Lecturer of Modern History at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. She is also Head of the Aston University Archives.

Research interests

  • Internationalism and international cooperation
  • The history of emotions
  • Aesthetics, political performances, and display
  • The League of Nations, transnational entities and movements
  • Interwar period, 1920s and 1930s
  • Archives and their history

Biography

A native of Italy, Ilaria studied at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice and at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she earned her Ph.D. in History.  She has been at Aston University since May 2018, first as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern History and then as Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor). Since 2024, she is also Head of the Aston University Archives. Before this, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Columbus State University, USA (2013–2018) and a Volkswagen-Mellon post-doctoral research fellow in Germany (Free University Berlin) and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre “History of Emotions” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (2016–17).

Ilaria’s main fields of interest include the history of internationalism and the history of emotions. She has recently published an edited volume together with archivist Valeria Vanesio: Archives and Emotions: International Dialogues Across Past, Present, and Future (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is also the author of a monograph: The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her previous publications dealt with the interplay of art and performative politics, nation branding and international cooperation, and the moral economy of internationalism.

She is now working on a new project on the emotional appeal of new technologies—photography and microfilm in particular—in archives, 1860s–1960s.

Ilaria regularly contributes to a number of blogs, podcasts, and publications for non-academic audiences.

Professional Activities

Ilaria is a Board Member of Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH) and she is an active committee member in the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). She also coordinates the UK/Ireland SHAFR Seminar.

She is a manuscript reviewer for Bloomsbury, Routledge, Manchester University Press, Contemporary European History, Diplomatic History, The Journal of World History, Modern American History, and Rethinking History.

In addition to numerous presentations at conferences in Europe and in the United States, she has given invited talks at the following:

  • National Autonomous University of Mexico
  • University of Malta
  • The National Archives of Malta
  • Royal College of Nursing
  • University of Birmingham
  • Humboldt University and Free University, Berlin, Germany
  • Centre for the Study of Internationalism, Birkbeck, University of London
  • King’s College London
  • University of Sussex
  • Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
  • Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
  • Université de Genève, Switzerland
  • John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University of Berlin, Germany
  • Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

Notable Awards and Recognitions:

  • Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
  • Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
  • Member of International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography
  • Aston Achievement Award for Outstanding Service to the University (2024)
  • Rachel Fuchs Memorial Award for Service to the Profession and Mentoring (2019); awarded by the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH) at the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting.
  • Best Newcomer Aston Excellence Award (2019) for outstanding achievements in research, teaching, citizenship, external engagement.
  • Outstanding Faculty in Study Abroad/International Education, Delta Nu Chapter of the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society (Spring 2016).

Teaching

At Aston University:

  • Global History in Perspective
  • History of Emotions
  • History of Internationalism
  • Making Histories—Historical Methods
  • Archives and Museum Project (applied module with local/regional institutions)
  • Emotions and Politics from the 19th to the 21st Century

She has also taught at Columbus State University, Free University Berlin, State University of New York at Buffalo.

https://aston.academia.edu/IlariaScaglia

https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/ilaria-scaglia-a9808348