Inaugural Professorial Lecture – Professor Mark Seymour

Modern Italian History: Personal and Political
About Professor Mark Seymour's research
Mark is a historian whose research explores the dynamic relationship between ‘the personal' and ‘the political', with a focus on 19th and 20th-century Italy.

His publications investigate the ways individual and collective experience are shaped by – and shape broader structures of society, such as politics, the law, and religion.

Mark's first book, Debating Divorce in Italy (Palgrave, 2006), analysed the long struggle to introduce divorce into Italian marriage legislation. His second monograph, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford University Press, 2020), uses a sensational Rome murder trial to examine how emotions were experienced, expressed, and shaped in the wake of Italian unification.

He has also published four co-edited volumes, most recently, From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789 (Bloomsbury, 2019), as well as journal articles and book chapters. Mark has been co-editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Modern Italy since 2015.

This lecture will be followed with light refreshments, tea, coffee and juice.