Davide Rodogno, Professor of International History, has published a new book dealing with soft power, exploring how scientific and technological exchanges forged a transnational consciousness to overcome problems caused by rapid industrialisation in Western Europe.

Until recently, the dominance of the nation-state paradigm had resulted in a focus on intergovernmental and diplomatic relations, with consequent underestimation of the significance of transnational social relations to policy-making processes. Co-edited with Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel, Shaping the transnational sphere: experts, networks, and issues from the 1840s to the 1930s explores the activities of experts’ networks or organisations beyond and below national borders in Europe, between the mid-nineteenth century and the early 1930s.

Contributions shed light on how experts had an important role in disseminating reform ideas and practices, which had heavily influenced Europe’s social reform movement. These social and cultural actors helped shape a new transnational sphere by creating communities crossing borders and languages, sharing knowledge and resources, and by participating in special events, congresses and world fairs. This compilation of scholar’s contributions also confronts the contradictions and connections between the ‘transnational consciousness’ among European intellectual elites and the rise of nation-state and nationalism in the same historical period.

Davide Rodogno is also Head of International History at the Graduate Institute. His most recent publications include Ideas and Identities: Theory and Practice in the Twentieth Century and Humanitarian Photography: a History.