GHIL Lecture by Professor Giorgio Riello (Florence)
Giorgio Riello is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute in Florence. His lecture charts the confluence and overlap between two different fields of historical enquiry: early modern global history and material culture. At a basic level, global historians’ interest in ‘things’ is the result of the fact that material artefacts—whether commodities, luxuries, scientific instruments, ethnographic specimens, or unique art objects—have been seen as being as mobile as people, if not more so. Yet the ‘material turn’ in global history also raises a series of methodological and theoretical questions concerning agency, mobility, and what is now called global microhistory. Among his works are Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (2013); with Peter McNeil, Luxury: A Rich History (2016); and Back in Fashion: Western Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present (2020).
Please register for this online event using the following link (this will take you to Eventbrite): https://bit.ly/2FoNg4G