Provisional PhD Thesis Title: Embers of empire: Post-Habsburg continuities in Italian South Tyrol
PhD Completion Date: 2027
PhD Supervisor: Cyrus Schayegh
In what manner do empires live on after their fall? My research revisits the transition from the Habsburg Empire to the Italian nation of modern-day Trentino and Alto-Adige. As South Tyrol, these regions were a part of the Habsburg Empire for centuries, made up of a linguistically and culturally diverse. After 1919, they became an ideological battlefield of the Italian Liberal and Fascist regimes. My work tracks down evidence of continuities of the Habsburg era in the Italian one, and primarily in individuals’ sense of political identity, following those individuals both within Italy and amongst its diaspora in the Americas.