Dr. Gilberto Mazzoli

Dr. Gilberto Mazzoli is a research associate in the ERC-funded project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility". He obtained his PhD in Modern History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His dissertation, titled “Portable Natures. Environmental Visions, Urban Practices, Migratory Flows. Agriculture and the Italian Experience in North American Cities. 1880-1940”, explores the Italian migration to the US through the lens of environmental history, with a focus on urban agriculture in its manifold aspects: gardening as a resilient migrants’ practice and its relationship with the US urban spaces, and gardening as a tool used by diplomats and authorities to manage migratory flows. The manuscript is under contract with The University of Pittsburgh Press.

He is currently working on his postdoctoral project titled “Collisions: Animal-Automobile Encounters in the United States, 1895-1964.” Collisions aims to explore the human-animal dimension of the rise of automobility in the United States from an Environmental Humanities perspective. Focusing on collisions between vehicles and wildlife in rural and urban contexts, this project wants to deepen the understanding of the relationship between humans and animals, their intertwinement with technology and the environment, and the role played by road-killed animals in the rise of environmental awareness. 

He is a member of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and a founding member of the SISAM (Italian Society for Environmental History). He is part of the web and communication committee of both societies. He was a visiting fellow at the European Institute of Columbia University, NYC, in 2019, and a PhD Fellow at the IEG Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz in 2022. In 2024, he was one of four recipients of the ESEH-Gale Fellowship in Digital Environmental Humanities.

You can visit his personal website here (external link, opens in a new window).

• Environmental History
• Modern Italian History
• Migration History
• Urban History
• North American History
• History of Knowledge
• Political Ecology
• History of Technology
• Animal Studies
• Digital Methods (HGIS).