Roberta Biasillo joined the Department of History and Art History as assistant professor in contemporary political history in 2022.  

She earned a PhD in Modern European History at the University of Bari (Italy) and she has been a postdoctoral researcher in several European institutions – the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the LMU Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and the European University Institute in Florence. Her research interests lie at the confluence of environmental history and political history.

She has focused on how marginal environments – such as forests and wetlands – embedded in Italian nineteenth century liberalism and on the role of African colonial environments in shaping Italian fascist state and empire. She is currently working on a research project on the global environmental history of Modern Libya.