INWOOD Team
Principal Investigator
Giacomo Bonan
Giacomo Bonan
Giacomo Bonan is full professor in modern history at the University of Turin and PI of the ERC StG 2023 project INWOOD. He has worked at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm; the Centre for the History of the Alps at the University of Italian Switzerland; the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna; the Historisches Seminar at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, the Rachel Carson Center at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Vossius Center at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of The State in the Forest (Cambridge, 2019) and Le acque agitate della patria (Rome, 2020). His research interests include forest history; water history; and rural social conflicts associated with modernisation.
Researchers
Kateryna Burkush
Kateryna Burkush
Kateryna Burkush is a research fellow at the Department of History at the University of Turin. She received her PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute (Florence) by writing a dissertation entitled “Inglorious Heroes of Labor: Transcarpathian Seasonal Workers under Late Socialism,” which explored economic, legal, and cultural conjunctures of contract labor in the late Soviet Union. She held research fellowships at the New Europe College (Bucharest), Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Imre Kertész Kolleg (Jena), and taught at the European School of Political and Social Sciences at Lille Catholic University. Her current research includes forest history with a focus on Eastern Galicia in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Vincenzo Colaprice
Vincenzo Colaprice
Vincenzo Colaprice is a research fellow in contemporary history at the University of Turin. He previously held a similar position at Roma Tre University (2024-2025) and earned a PhD in Humanities from the University of Bari (2021-2024), with a focus on Digital Humanities and historical research. He has conducted research in Germany (University of Cologne) and Portugal (NOVA University Lisbon), collaborating with academic and cultural institutions in Italy and abroad. His research interests include the political and social history of republican Italy as well as environmental history, with a focus on forested areas and the use of historical and cartographic sources.
Csongor Jánosi
Csongor Jánosi
Csongor Jánosi is a research fellow of the Department of History at the University of Turin. He is a former scientific researcher of the Pokoly Association from Cluj-Napoca, of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB), Social Sciences Division, and of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has done research, and published in several areas, including the Romanian Reformed Church, the relationship between Romanian and Hungarian secret services during 1945-1989, the Transylvanian Hungarian dissent under communism, and the Transylvanian Hungarian aristocracy in the 20th century.
Claudio Lorenzini
Claudio Lorenzini
Claudio Lorenzini is a researcher in Economic History at the University of Turin. He holds a PhD in History: Cultures and Structures of Frontier Areas from the University of Udine. At the same university, he has worked as a historian, anthropologist, and archivist, with a particular focus on Digital Humanities. His research interests include the social and economic history of the Alps, demographic history and forest history. He is the author of Una fedele economia (Udine, 2024) and co-editor of Via dalla montagna (Udine, 2019, together with A. Fornasin).
Silvia Pizzirani
Silvia Pizzirani
Silvia Pizzirani is a research fellow in contemporary history at the University of Turin. She earned her PhD in History at the University of Bologna with a dissertation in contemporary history, later published as the book Il consumo è una cosa seria. Storia politica e culturale degli anni Settanta. She has held research fellowships at the University of Milan and at the German Historical Institute in Rome. She has collaborated with companies and cultural associations on historical research and public history projects. Her work focuses on the history of consumption, political history, and environmental history. Among her publications are Oro nero, politica verde? Eni, ambiente ed energia nel secondo dopoguerra (Impresa e Storia, FrancoAngeli) and Consumi e politica nella storia d’Europa (Ricerche di Storia Politica, Il Mulino).
Project Manager
Sara Amerio
Sara Amerio
Sara Amerio graduated in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the Conservation and Restoration Centre in Venaria Reale (Turin, Italy). For over ten years, she worked as a freelance restorer, contributing to projects focused on the conservation, documentation, and maintenance of cultural assets. Her experience includes collaboration with institutions, private partners, and multidisciplinary teams. Since 2024, she has been working in the administrative management of European projects for the University of Turin. Her tasks include monitoring and supporting project activities, handling documentation and financial reporting.
Associated Researchers
Giulia Beltrametti
Giulia Beltrametti
Giulia Beltrametti is a research fellow at the University of Turin. She holds a PhD in Social History from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, as well as a PhD in Historical Geography for the Enhancement of Historical and Environmental Heritage from the University of Genoa. She has been a Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She was an associate researcher at the Laboratory for the History of the Alps at the University of Italian Switzerland. With extensive experience working in state archives, her research focuses on social history, environmental and rural history, and the intersections between legal and social anthropology.
Cristiano La Lumia
Cristiano La Lumia
Cristiano La Lumia earned his Ph.D. in Global History & Governance from the University of Naples Federico II and the Scuola Superiore Meridionale by completing a dissertation titled The War Against Germans: Economic Nationalism, Property Rights, and Citizenship of German Ex- Enemy Aliens (1918-1933) under the supervision of Prof. Daniela L. Caglioti. His research explores German history, economic nationalism, and the interplay between economics and politics. From July 2024 to May 2025, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a project examining the commercial protectionist policies of the German Empire in the timber trade.
Giulio Taccetti
Giulio Taccetti
Giulio Taccetti is research fellow at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Turin. Affiliated fellow at the Italian-German Historical Institute (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) and associate researcher at the Centre for the History of the Alps at the University of Italian Switzerland, he has also worked at the National Institute “Ferruccio Parri” and at the University of Florence. His research interests focus on social and cultural history between the 19th and 20th centuries.
Lucia Tedesco
Lucia Tedesco
Lucia Tedesco is a PhD candidate in Cultural Heritage, Historical-Artistic, Audiovisual and Multimedia Production at the University of Turin and the Italian-German Historical Institute (FBK-ISIG). Her research focuses on the social history of forests in Fiemme Valley (Trento, Italy) between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds a MA in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Bologna and a second-level Master’s degree in Environmental Humanities from the Roma Tre University. Her research interests include environmental history, history of science, and history of women.
Advisory Board
Katja Bruisch
Ussher Assistant Professor,
Trinity College Dublin
Katja Bruisch
Katja Bruisch is an environmental historian at Trinity College Dublin interested in energy, resource extraction and land-use change in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Her work has explored the forgotten history of peat during the rise of Russia’s industrial metabolism, the drainage and conservation of wetlands, and experts in the context of the “agrarian question” in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. She is the author of Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war: Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Böhlau, 2014).
Simone Gingrich
Full Professor,
BOKU University Vienna
Simone Gingrich
Simone Gingrich is full professor in environmental history at the Institute of Social Ecology, BOKU University in Vienna. She has worked at Alpen-Adria Universität and conducted research stays at University of Leeds and Universidad Pablo Olavide. Her research addresses material environmental history and long-term socio- ecological research, focusing on land and resource use in 19th and 20th century Europe. Methodologically, she connects the interdisciplinary sustainability sciences with historical approaches. In 2017, she was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant (“Hidden emissions of forest transitions”) and in 2018, she was elected member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Currently she leads the FWF-funded project “The Industrialization of Austrian Forests 1766-1914”.
John R. McNeill
Distinguished Professor,
Georgetown University
John R. McNeill
John R. McNeill, Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University, has authored or edited more than 20 books, including Something New Under the Sun, listed by the London Times among the 10 best science books ever written (despite being a history book); and Mosquito Empires, which won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association; and most recently The Webs of Humankind (2 vols.). He is a former president of both the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association, an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Europaea; a member of the Académie Royale du Maroc; and of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Union of the Geological Sciences. In 2018 he received the Heineken Award for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. His main research interest is environmental history.
Péter Szabó
Senior Researcher and Lecturer, Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Masaryk University Brno
Péter Szabó
Péter Szabó is senior researcher at the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and he also lectures at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Before moving to Brno in 2008, he worked at the Archaeological Institute of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. His research ranges from prehistoric forest dynamics through medieval woodland management to the study of the effects of great windstorms on forests in the past two centuries. He also published on the conceptual aspects of connecting ecology with history. He was the PI of the ERC funded LONGWOOD project. In 2017-2019 he was the President of the European Society for Environmental History. In addition, he serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Environment and History and Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History.
Paul Warde
Professor of Environmental History, Cambridge University
Paul Warde
Paul Warde is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Cambridge. His interests focus on natural resource use and its role in shaping working lives, communities, societies and economic development, with a longstanding interest in European forests and wood use. He has written and edited ten books and numerous articles and chapters on economic, environmental and energy history, including Ecology, economy and state formation in early modern Germany (2006); The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny 1500-1870 (2018) and The Environment: a History of the Idea (2018). He is Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge; Research Director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure; and edits the journal Agricultural History Review.
