Dr Luca Zenobi is a historian of Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean world between 1300 and 1600. Having read history and trained as an archivist in Milan, he moved to Oxford for his PhD and then to Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at Trinity College and an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of History. He joined the University of Edinburgh at the beginning of 2023 as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, and IASH shortly thereafter as an Affiliate.
I like to think of my work as a geography of the past. I am interested in how people articulated their presence in the landscape, moved and communicated across distances, and ultimately inscribed their experiences in both texts and objects. I have written articles and book chapters on the process of community- and territory-formation, the spatial organisation of factions and family militias, and the experience of migration, exile and displacement. Recent projects include a volume on early modern disinformation, which was developed in collaboration with literary scholars, as well as essays on topics such as medieval marriage networks and the comparative history of rivers and waterways.
My first single-authored monograph, titled 'Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy', was published by OUP in the summer of 2023. The book explores how borders were understood, made and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity.