Rome Advisory Committee
Since 2014, the Cushwa Center has collaborated with Notre Dame Rome to host international seminars and conferences, frequent lectures and panels, and two research fellowships in Rome, Italy.
The center’s Rome Advisory Committee was inaugurated in 2017 and is chaired by Luca Codignola, Cushwa’s senior fellow in Rome. Members share their expertise, participate in Cushwa events and projects, and help develop partnerships with European universities and research institutes. The following scholars are serving on the committee through December 2027:
Matteo Binasco
Matteo Binasco, D.L. (Genova), M.A. (Saint Mary’s), Ph.D. (NUI Galway), is assistant professor of early modern history at Università per Stranieri di Siena. He has been a research fellow at the Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea of Italy’s National Research Council and a postdoctoral fellow at the Cushwa Center.
He has authored Roman Sources for the History of American Catholicism, 1763–1939 (2018), Making, Breaking and Remaking the Irish Missionary Network: Ireland, Rome and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (2020), and French Missionaries in Acadia/Nova Scotia, 1654–1755. On a Risky Edge (2022). He has also edited Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic World, 1622–1908 (2018), Luke Wadding, the Irish Franciscans and Global Catholicism (2020), The English Community of Rome, 1500–1829 (2026), and The Irish Atlantic (2026). He is currently working on a book on the Irish Catholic missionaries in the early modern Caribbean.
Flavia Canestrini
Flavia Canestrini, D.L., M.A. (Pisa), Ph.D. (Sciences Po, Paris), is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy. She is also adjunct professor of global history at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) in Rome, where she previously held a postdoctoral fellowship. A past visiting fellow at Northwestern University, she is an international and economic historian whose research examines the intersections of late 20th-century globalization, U.S. foreign policy, and international economic relations.
Her forthcoming book, based on her dissertation, examines how expanding markets in the 1980s transformed economic sanctions into key instruments of power and influence in global affairs.
Luca Codignola
Luca Codignola, D.L. (Roma), M.A. (Toronto), D.Litt. (hon., Saint Mary’s), FRSC, is senior fellow of the Cushwa Center and adjunct professor in the Department of History of Saint Mary’s University, Canada. In 2016, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2018 to the Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 1990 to 2016, he was professor of early North American history at the University of Genoa (Italy), and from 2008 to 2012 he served as director of the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe of Italy’s National Research Council. He has taught at Bologna, Pisa, Genoa, Rome (Regina Apostolorum), York (Toronto), Laval (Québec), Toronto, McGill (Montréal), and Saint Mary’s, and has also been variously associated with universities and academic institutions in Salzburg, London, Ottawa, Montréal, Providence, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. His main field of research is the Roman Catholic Church in the North Atlantic region (mainly the United States and Canada) in the early modern era, but he has also written on the history of early European expansion.
His latest books are Le Saint-Siège, le Canada et le Québec, with G. Pizzorusso and M. Sanfilippo (2011); Little Do We Know: History and Historians of the North Atlantic, 1492–2010, ed. by M. Binasco (2011); Storia del Canada, with L. Bruti-Liberati (2018); and Blurred Nationalities Across the North Atlantic: Traders, Priests, and Their Kin Travelling Between North America and the Italian Peninsula, 1763–1846 (2019).
Elisabetta Corsi
Elisabetta Corsi, D.L. (Sapienza, Rome), M.A. (Beijing Daxue), Ph.D. (Sapienza, Rome), is professor of sinology and East Asian history at Sapienza Università di Roma. She previously taught at El Colegio de México (1994–2007). From 2015 to 2021, she served as deputy chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel (JRS) of the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong. She served as a member of the Committee for the Promotion of Public Science of Italy’s Ministry of University and Research until 2023. Her research focuses on themes at the intersection of art and science, particularly the role of Jesuit missionaries as scientific and artistic mediators during the early modern period.
Her publications include: Órdenes religiosas entre América y Asia. Ideas para una historia misionera de los espacios coloniales (2008); “Idolatrous Images and True Images: European Visual Culture and Its Circulation in Early Modern China,” in I. Del Valle, A. More, and R.S. O’Toole, Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (2020), pp. 271–302; The Drawings of Ferdinando Bonaventura Moggi (1684–1761) and the Applied Arts Workshops at the Qing Court, in D. Greenberg and Y. Hara, eds., From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue (2024); and Biligui Jie: On the Proportional Compass, with F. Camerota (2025), on the spread of G. Galilei’s proportional compass to China.
Susanna De Stradis
Susanna De Stradis, D.L., M.A. (Pisa), Lic. (Scuola Normale Superiore), Ph.D. (Notre Dame), is assistant professor in 20th-century U.S. religious history at Mississippi State University. She has been a Religion, Society, and Democratic Renewal Fellow with the Social Science Research Council and a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on 20th-century U.S. Catholics’ institutional and cultural relationship with Rome and Rome’s impact on American religion and politics.
Her work has appeared in both European and American scholarly and public-facing volumes and journals, such as Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, Religion Compass, Religion and American Culture, The Immanent Frame, and Commonweal.
Jane Eade
Jane Eade, B.A. (Hons), M.A., Ph.D., is the director of heritage collections for the Venerable English College, Rome. Formerly a cultural heritage curator for the U.K. conservation charity the National Trust, she has also worked as a curator for the National Portrait Gallery (London), Courtauld Gallery (London), and for university and private collections. She has broad research interests in early modern religious history and visual culture, particularly portraiture. Her Ph.D. explored the relationship between sight and the concept of insight in the figurative arts of the European Baroque.
Relevant publications include “The Representation of Faith and Religion,” in K. Anderson, J. Field, and C. Murray, eds., Reframing King James VI & I, special issue of British Art Studies (December 2025); “Between the Sacred and the Profane: Framing Early English Portraiture,” in C. Strunck, ed., Glaube, Politik und die Künste: Frühneuzeitliche Transfers zwischen katholischen und protestantischen Kulturen (2019); “The Family of Sir Thomas More Revisited,” in D. Adshead, ed., The National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual 2015, in association with Apollo, with D. Taylor (2015); “Power and Sacred Art,” in N. Llewellyn and M. Snodin, assisted by J. Norman, eds., Baroque 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence (2009).
Giovan Battista Fidanza
Giovan Battista Fidanza, D.L., Ph.D. (Perugia), is professor of early modern art history at Università di Roma Tor Vergata, where he has served as director of the National Ph.D. Program in Cultural Heritage since 2022. He has also been visiting professor at Pennsylvania State University, Erie, The Behrend College (2013), and director of Villa Mondragone, a monumental papal villa owned by Università Tor Vergata (2020–22). His research focuses on art patronage in the 17th century and the history of wooden sculpture in the early modern period in central Italy, particularly in the Papal States and Florence.
He has recently published articles in leading journals such as The Burlington Magazine, Renaissance Studies, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, and Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. He has also authored Luke Wadding’s Art: Irish Franciscan Patronage in Seventeenth-Century Rome (2016); Andrea Sacchi and Cardinal del Monte: The Rediscovered Frescoes in the Palazzo di Ripetta in Rome (2022); and Patronage and Devotion (2022). In 2024, the Cushwa Center granted him a Hibernian Research Award for the project “The Irish church of St. Isidore in Rome as a means of representing a great tradition: the rhetorical efficacy of the main eighteenth-century pictorial decorations.”
Maria Susanna Garroni
Maria Susanna Garroni has taught North American history at the Università di Napoli L’Orientale and Università Roma Tre. Her research and writing focus on Italian immigration to the United States, as well as gender history and political history, particularly with regard to U.S. pacifist feminist women and their international connections.
The editor of a pioneering book on Italian women religious and U.S. immigration, Sorelle d’oltreoceano. Religiose italiane ed emigrazione negli Stati Uniti, una storia da scoprire (2008), she recently published “Interpreting Little Italies: Ethnicity as an Accident of Geography,” in W.J. Connell and S.G. Pugliese, eds., The Routledge History of Italian Americans (2018); “Spaghetti with Meatballs is not Italian. L’‘Italianamericanism’ delle italiane emigrate negli Stati Uniti nel Novecento,” in S. Luconi and M. Verdicchio, eds., Lontane da casa. Donne italiane e diaspora globale dall’inizio del Novecento (2015); and “Italiane migranti,” in P. Corti and M. Sanfilippo, eds., Migrazioni, with E. Vezzosi (2009). She has also published “Lo sfilacciarsi della rete: pacifiste femministe fra Europa e Stati Uniti,” in S. Bartoloni, ed., La Grande Guerra delle Italiane. Mobilitazioni, diritti e trasformazioni (2016); and “Peace, Reform, and Democracy: U.S. Wilpfers, Transnational Dialogue, and the Birth of a Gendered Political Discourse,” in F. Fasce et al, eds., Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective (2013).
Massimo Carlo Giannini
Massimo Carlo Giannini, D.L. (Pavia), Ph.D. (Repubblica di San Marino), is professor of early modern history at Università di Teramo; scientific director of Istituto Sangalli per la Storia e le Culture Religiose (Florence); research fellow of Instituto Europeo la Corte en Europa at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; and research fellow of Red Columnaria-Red Temática de Investigación sobre las Fronteras de las Monarquías Ibéricas. He has been visiting fellow at the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques, Casa de Velázquez (Madrid) (2014), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2023–25). His main research interests are the history of papal finances in the early modern age; the history of religious orders; and the financial and political history of the Spanish monarchy.
He recently authored I domenicani (2016), which was translated into Ukrainian, and Per difesa comune. Fisco, clero e comunità nello Stato di Milano (1535–1659), vol. 1, Dalle guerre d’Italia alla pax hispanica (1535–1592) (2017). He has also edited Papacy, Religious Orders, and International Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (2013), and Fiscalità e religione nell’Europa cattolica. Idee, linguaggi e pratiche (secoli XIV–XIX) (2015).
Manfredi Merluzzi
Manfredi Merluzzi, D.L., M.A. (Sapienza, Rome), Ph.D. (Genoa), is professor of early modern history at Università Roma Tre, where he is head of the Department of Humanities and director of the Advanced Program in Historical Communication: Multimedia and Digital Languages. He is a member and leader of several international research groups. His main research interests are history and representations of power between Europe and America in the Spanish monarchy, and the role of religion in the construction of viceregal colonial societies.
His publications include Gobernando los Andes. Francisco de Toledo virrey del Perú 1569–1581 (2014); Para la Quietud del Reino. Negociación y gobierno en el Perú (1533–1581) (2019); Conoscenza, governo e narrazione del potere nelle Monarchie Iberiche (secoli XVI–XVIII), with G. Sabatini and F. Tudini (2020); La Vergine contesa: Roma, l’Immacolata Concezione e l’universalismo della Monarchia Cattolica, with G. Sabatini and F. Tudini (2022). He has also published “La costruzione letteraria della capitale: Bernabé Cobo e la Historia de la fundación de Lima (1639),” Mediterranea–ricerche storiche (2020); and “Alzarse con la tierra. Rebelión, lenguaje e imaginario político en la revuelta peruana de 1543–1548,” in A. Hugon and A. Merle, eds., Soulèvements, révoltes, révolutions dans la monarchie espagnole au temps des Habsbourg (2016).
Raffaella Perin
Raffaella Perin, D.L. (Padua), Ph.D. (Padua), Ph.D. (Pisa-Paris), is associate professor of history of Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan, Italy). She serves on the editorial boards of Annali di scienze religiose, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo, and Modernism. She is also advisory editor of the Jesuit Historical Institute (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu), and a member of the scientific committees for the Opera Omnia of Carlo Maria Martini and for the Institute for the History of Catholic Action and the Catholic Movement in Italy Paul VI. She is currently involved in two international research projects: one on the pontificate of Pius XII, funded by the Agence nationale de la recherche (France), and another on Catholicism and Gender, funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Spain). Her research focuses on the history of the 20th-century papacy, particularly the Holy See’s relations with Jews and Protestants, the role of media in Vatican politics and diplomacy, and Catholic antimodernism. She authored The Popes on Air: The History of Vatican Radio from Its Origins to World War II (2024), and is currently completing an intellectual biography of Pietro Tacchi Venturi, S.J.
Pierantonio Piatti
Pierantonio Piatti, D.L. (Firenze), Ph.D. (Roma Tor Vergata), is secretary of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences. He holds a diploma in archives sciences from the Vatican School of Palaeography, Diplomatics and Archives Administration of the Vatican Apostolic Archives, and a diploma in library science from the School of Library Science of the Vatican Apostolic Library. He is director of the series “Atti e Documenti del Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche” published by LEV-Libreria Editrice Vaticana; historical consultant for the Vatican Dicastery of the Causes of Saints; secretary of the Commission Internationale d’Histoire et d’Études du Christianisme; member of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Cateriniani (Rome); and member of the Deputation for National History of Tuscany (Florence). His main research fields are hagiography, the history of religious orders, and the history of women religious. He recently edited Libellus quasi speculum. Studi offerti a Bernard Ardura (2022); Storia del Cristianesimo in Umbria, with A. Maiarelli and A. Possieri (2024), and I Domenicani e i Concili, with L. Cinelli (2024).
Giovanni Pizzorusso
Giovanni Pizzorusso, D.L. (Pisa), Ph.D. (Genova), is professor of early modern history at Università G. d’Annunzio (Chieti-Pescara). He has been visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Max-Planck Institut (Frankfurt am Main), and Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot. His main research interests are the history of Catholic missionary institutions in the age of early globalization (Propaganda Fide) and the role of missionaries in the circulation of knowledge in an Atlantic and global perspective. He recently published “The New World of the New Society of Jesus: Giovanni Antonio Grassi and his Notizie varie sullo stato presente della Repubblica degli Stati Uniti (1818),” in P.-A. Fabre, P. Goujon, and M.M. Morales, eds., La Compagnie de Jésus des anciens régimes au monde contemporain (XVIIIe–XXe siècles) (2020); “From the Americas to Rome: Paths of Knowledge among the Roman Curia during the Seventeenth Century,” in G. Abbattista, ed., Knowledge and Representation of the World in Italy from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (2021); and Propaganda Fide. La Congregazione pontificia e la giurisdizione sulle missioni (2022).
Roberto Regoli
Roberto Regoli, HED, HEL, PhBA, STBA (Gregoriana, Rome), is professor of modern church history at the Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome), where he serves as editor of Archivum Historiae Pontificiae. His areas of research include the history of the papacy, the Roman Curia, and pontifical diplomacy from the 19th to the 21st century. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Apostolic Penitentiary, Centro Studi di Cultura Cristiana of the Giorgio La Pira International Center (Florence), Premio Ambasciatori presso la Santa Sede, and Commission of New Martyrs—Witnesses of the Faith (Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Holy See). He is founder and coordinator of the “Pontificia Series” of Edizioni Studium.
He has authored or edited Ercole Consalvi. Le scelte per la Chiesa (2006); Beyond the Crises in the Church: The Pontificate of Benedict XVI (2016, 2024); La Santa Sede, gli Stati Uniti e le relazioni internazionali durante il pontificato di Pio XII. Studi dopo l’apertura degli archivi vaticani (1939–1958), with M. Sanfilippo (2022); Ercole Consalvi, Memorie (2024); Vatican Diplomacy and the Shaping of the West During the Pontificate of Pius XII, with P. Valvo and N. Doublet (2025).
Federico M. Requena
Federico M. Requena, D.L. (Murcia), M.A. (Murcia, Santa Croce), Ph.D. (Navarra), is senior fellow at the Istituto Storico San Josemaría Escrivá at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome, and editor of its academic journal, Studia et Documenta. He is also a researcher at the Universidad de Navarra. He has been a visiting fellow at the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on United States and European religious history, religious historiography, and the history of Opus Dei.
He has authored Espiritualidad en la España de los años veinte (1999), Fuentes para la Historia del Opus Dei (2002), and Católicos, devociones y sociedad durante la dictadura de Primo de Rivera y la Segunda República (2008). Contributions in U.S. Catholic Historian include “The Impact of the Second Vatican Council on United States Catholic Historiography” (2015); “‘Harvard and Catholic . . . are not incompatible’: Father William Porras’ Chaplaincy at Harvard University, 1954–1960” (2018); and “Apostolic Sanctity in the World: Joseph E. Haley, C.S.C., and Total Dedication for the Laity on the Eve of Vatican II, 1949–1961” (2022).
Daniela Rossini
Until 2022, Daniela Rossini served as professor of North American history and women’s international history at Università Roma Tre. She spent three years at Harvard University as a Fulbright scholar in the History Department and as a fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, with which she has since been periodically affiliated. Her research interests include World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy, Italian-American relations, war relief and propaganda, and women’s transnational history in the early decades of the 20th century.
Her publications have appeared in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Her latest authored books include Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy: Culture, Diplomacy, and War Propaganda (2008); Donne e propaganda internazionale. Percorsi femminili tra Italia e Stati Uniti nell’età della Grande Guerra (2015). She has also co-edited 1917. L’inizio del secolo americano. Politica, propaganda e cultura in Italia tra guerra e dopoguerra (2018), and Sole verso nuove patrie. Domestiche e intellettuali, missionarie e prostitute, operaie e artiste. Le donne nell’emigrazione italiana fra ’800 e ’900 (2025).
Matteo Sanfilippo
Matteo Sanfilippo, D.L. (Sapienza, Rome), Ph.D. (Genova), is professor of early modern history at Università della Tuscia (Viterbo). He is also scientific coordinator of the journal Studi Emigrazione; director of the Istituto Storico Scalabriniano (Rome); and co-editor of the journal Archivio storico dell’emigrazione italiana.
He recently authored Tony and Paddy went to Hollywood. Italiani e irlandesi nella filmografia statunitense (2022), Il lungo Ottocento delle migrazioni italiane (2023); Breve storia statistica dell’emigrazione italiana, with Lorenzo Prencipe (2025), Fidando nell’aiuto di Dio: Storia della Congregazione Scalabriniana (1887–2024), with G. Battistella and G. Terragni (2025). He also edited La Santa Sede, gli Stati Uniti e le relazioni internazionali durante il pontificato di Pio XII, with R. Regoli (2022); I Collegi per stranieri a/e Roma nell’età moderna, 3 vols., with A. Boccolini, P. Roy-Lysencourt, and P. Tusor (2023–5); Migrazioni moderne e contemporanee. Un approccio globale, with W. Montanari (2024).
Maurizio Sangalli
Maurizio Sangalli, D.L. (Pavia), Ph.D. (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan), is professor of early modern history at Università per Stranieri di Siena. The main topics of his research are the Italian social and religious history from the 16th to the 18th century and the history of education in the pre-Unification Italian states.
His latest books are Le smanie per l’educazione. Le Scuole pie a Venezia in età moderna (2012); Maria Teresa d’Asburgo. L’arte del possibile (2014), and Una città, due imperi. Amministrazione pubblica e decurionato a Lodi tra Spagna e Austria (secoli XVI–XVIII) (2018).
Massimiliano Valente
Massimiliano Valente, M.A., Ph.D. (Sapienza, Rome), diploma in archives sciences (Vatican School of Palaeography, Diplomatics and Archives Administration), is professor of modern history at Università Europea di Roma and teaches early modern and modern church history at the Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum in Rome. He was previously employed at the Vatican Secret Archives and at the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences. He has also been variously associated with the German Historical Institute (Rome), the Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave (Slovakia), the Sveučilište u Splitu (Croatia), and the Institut Catholique de Paris. His main research topic is Vatican foreign policy during the 19th and 20th centuries.
He has recently authored “Päpstliche Mobilisierungsfähigkeit während der beiden Weltkriege,” Römische Quartalschrift, 112 (2017); “Benedetto XV e l’Ufficio provvisorio per informazioni sui prigionieri di guerra,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 99 (2019); and L’Ostpolitik della Santa Sede e la Jugoslavia socialista 1945–1971 (2020). He has also edited Il cardinale Pietro Gasparri, segretario di Stato (1914–1930), with L. Pettinaroli (2020); A Vatican Atlantic Alliance: Pius XII and the Role of U.S. Papal Diplomats in the Cold War (2024); and Pio XII e l’Anno Santo 1950, with P. Piatti (2026).