Dr Tommaso Zerbi is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. He is an architectural historian who specialises in responses to the past — with an emphasis on responses to the Middle Ages (medievalism) — in the modern world. Tommaso is particularly engaged in interrogating the entanglements of practices of reception and revival, and attitudes towards the pre-modern built environment, with systems of power and notions of empire, alterity, and nationhood. His past and ongoing research focuses on modern Italy, its former colonies in the African continent and the Mediterranean Basin, and Anglo-Italian relations.
Between completing a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 and returning to Edinburgh in 2025, Tommaso held research fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at the British School at Rome (2021), the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (2022 and 2023–2024), 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, he graduated (MArch, BArch) summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano. A recipient of the Barrie Wilson Award from the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Tommaso earned recognition from the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and the Italian Embassy in London, among others.
While his first book project (‘Building the Risorgimento: Architecture, Medievalism, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Italy’) scrutinises the intersections of architecture and medievalism vis-à-vis the making of Italy, his Leverhulme-funded second book project (‘The Colonial Middle Ages: Architecture, Revival and Italian Imperialism, 1911–36’) investigates their exchanges in the material and ontological construction of the Italian Empire.