Barbara Naddeo

Candidate statement

Barbara Naddeo is an Associate Professor of History at The City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she teaches European history, 1400-1800. A historian of eighteenth-century Italy with wide-ranging interests, she has published interdisciplinary work on a wide variety of topics, including opera buffa, the Grand Tour, cartography and geography, medical anthropology and “southern” ideas about developmental inequalities. That work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Imago Mundi, Modern Intellectual History, and specialty Italian journals. Naddeo is also author of the award-winning monograph on Giambattista Vico, Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (Cornell University Press; winner, Barzun Prize), which has showed that Vico’s new science was, in its first instance, a polemic against the inequalities of metropolitan society and a manifesto on the rights of its disenfranchised, which controversially prescribed natural jurisprudence and the norms of equity as the practical means of their redress over time. Her current book project examines the transformation of the state wrought by the information revolution, on which she has undertaken extensive research in southern Italian archives. For her case study, she has chosen the famous Italian statistician Giuseppe Maria Galanti (1743—1806), whose magnum opus, an encyclopedic political geography of the Kingdom of Naples was, in its time, unprecedented for its extensive publication of social numbers and archival vision of the modern state. This project has been supported by the awards of numerous institutions: such as, the Rome Prize in Early Modern Studies, a Humanities Fellowship at the Italian Academy for Advanced Study in America at Columbia, as well as a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. Naddeo has served extensively at CUNY, where she sits on the Executive Committees of both her home department at The City College and the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center, both of which she has helped to administer in myriad ways. She has also served ASECS as a member of the Clifford Prize Committee and would be honored to serve on its Executive Board. She has been an active member of a number of other professional associations, including the Renaissance Society of America and the History of Science Society, and has throughout her career pursued productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars working on early modern Europe and its colonial world.