Biographical Note
Amerigo Caruso is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Bonn. In November 2017, he was awarded his PhD in History from Saarland University. Before joining the History Department in Bonn, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Padua. He has published widely on the history of nationalism, antifeminism, political violence and social conflicts in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. His recent publications include “The Threat from Within across Empires: Strikes, Labor Migration, and Violence in Central Europe, 1900-1914,” Central European History 54, no. 1, (2021) and “A Permanent State of Exception? Managing Crises in Late Imperial Germany and the Early Weimar Republic, 1917-1923,” in Martin Wagner et al. (eds.), Crises in Authoritarian Regimes: Fragile Orders and Contested Power (Campus 2022). He is the author of “Blut und Eisen auch im Innern”. Soziale Konflikte, Massenpolitik und Gewalt in Deutschland vor 1914 (Campus 2021), an exploration of anti-labor violence and the challenge of mass politics in late Imperial Germany.
States of Emergency in Transnational Perspective: Politics, Ideas, and Mentalities in Europe and its Colonies, c. 1800-1950
The multiple crises of the twenty-first century – from 9/11 to the corona virus pandemic and Putin’s aggression against Ukraine – have brought into sharper focus emergency politics and the surrounding debates. However, this field remains a domain of political science, philosophy, and jurisprudence, whereas the practice and theory of emergency politics has not received the same degree of scholarly attention among historians. Most of the existing research focuses on national experiences, especially on the use and abuse of emergency legislation in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Furthermore, traditional approaches to the history of states of emergency explore primarily political and legal developments. A comprehensive approach that also considers social and cultural historical paradigms is still missing. The goal of my project is to provide a systematic historical study of emergency politics and the “mentality” underlying them. It follows a twofold approach: first, to displace the focus on the nation-state using a combination of the methods of comparative, transnational, and entangled history. Second, the project examines states of emergency not only within the framework of political and legal history but also as more complex social and cultural phenomena. An extensive use of emergency powers and modern legal articulations of the state of emergency emerged after the French Revolution and spread throughout Europe and its colonial empires during the first half of the nineteenth century. This project investigates transfers and entanglements between France, Italy, Germany and their colonies, which were particularly intense from the late eighteenth until the mid-twentieth century.