Caterina Scalvedi is a historian of modern European colonialism focusing on empire-building in Italy and its African colonies in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Her research explores intellectual and social histories of colonial knowledge circulation, education for colonial subjects, missions, and labor. She has joined the Friedrich Meinecke Institute as a 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with a project funded by the European Commission (08/2025-07/2027). For this project (COLED), she is exploring how common ideas of colonial education—education for colonial subjects—formed and changed through transnational and transectoral knowledge transfers at five international organizations (1900-1961), while also completing her first book manuscript ‘Subjects of Empire: Colonial Education and Imperial Crisis in Italian Africa, 1890-1960’. Before moving to Berlin, she was awarded a PhD in History at the University of Illinois Chicago in 2023 and held visiting positions at Wake Forest University and Indiana University Bloomington.
ORCID: 0009-0009-2477-1938
“‘A Printing Record’? Italy’s Colonial Schoolbook Market.” Contemporanea 2 (2025): p. 237-255. doi: 10.1409/117717
“Unpredictable Empire. Reflections from a Historian of Fascist Italy.” Ab Imperio 1 (2025): p. 106-131. doi: 10.1353/imp.2025.a960614
“Making the Colonial School: Catholic Teachers and Muslim Students in Italian Somalia (1930-1941).” In History through Narratives of Education in Africa. Social Histories in Times of Colonization and Post Independence (1920s-1970s), edited by Pierre Guidi, Ellen Vea Rosnes, Jean-Luc Martineau, p. 65-96. Leiden: Brill, 2024. doi: 10.1163/9789004690172_004
“The Missionary at the Gates of ‘Dawn’: Educational Continuities from Fascist Somalia through the UN Order (1920s-50s).” Northeast African Studies 22, n. 1 (2023): p. 45-89.
“Cruce et Aratro: Fascism, Missionary Schools, and Labor in 1920s Italian Somalia.” In Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Policies, Paradigms, and Entanglements, 1890s-1980s, edited by Miguel Bandeira Jéronimo, Hugo Dores, and Damiano Matasci, p. 143-171. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-27801-4_6
Recensioni:
Review of Erica Moretti, The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children’s Rights. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. H-Italy, November 6, 2024. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61411
Review of Pierre Guidi, Éduquer la Nation en Éthiopie. École, État et identités dans le Wolaita (1941-1991). Rennes, France: IRD Editions, 2020. Revue d’Histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique. June 2021. doi: 10.51185/journals/rhca.2021.e494