Dr Fabio Simonetti
Lecturer in European Politics and History

Research area(s)

• Twentieth-century Italian and European History
• Social history of war and occupation
• Soldier-civilian and gender encounters in war zones
• Oral history and autobiographical sources

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in understanding how war and occupation affect people’s lives and how societies respond to them by exploring wartime encounters between soldiers and civilians through the prism of autobiographical sources, material culture, and artistic representations in connection with official documentation.

My first monograph - Via Tasso. Quartier generale e carcere tedesco durante l’occupazione di Roma (2016) - explored the history and memory of Via Tasso, the Gestapo/SD HQ and prison in Nazi-occupied Rome. I have also published articles on the British soldiers' perception of their encounter with locals in Sicily, the material culture of the Allied occupation of Italy, and the construction of a stereotyped image of the ‘enemy’ in Britain and Italy in the 1940s.

My first monograph in the English language, due to be published by the Oxford University Press in late 2025, will explore the social dynamics of the encounter between British soldiers and Italian civilians during the Second World War Allied occupation of Italy.