I am a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence and Honorary Research Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham. My research focuses on populism in Italy and Western Europe, political parties and local democracy. I am the co-editor with Daniele Albertazzi of Twenty-First Century Populism (Palgrave, 2008) and have recently published on the Lega Nord and Outsider Parties. I have co-edited, with Anna Bosco, the 2012 ‘Politica in Italia/Italian Politics’ yearbook, published in Italian and English by Il Mulino and Berghahn. Together with Albertazzi, I am currently working on a book entitled ‘Populists in Power’ which will be published by Routledge.
After graduating from Trinity College Dublin, I completed a Masters Degree at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth and gained a PhD in Political Science at the Department of Political Studies in the University of Turin. I have worked as a Politics lecturer and researcher at the University of Turin and have collaborated with Daniele Albertazzi in Birmingham on a series of publications and research projects over the past decade. In 2011, I was Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Political and International Studies, University of Lausanne. I moved from Turin to the European University Institute in September 2011, initially as a Jean Monnet Fellow and, as of September 2012, as a Marie Curie Fellow. Since January 2011, I have been Honorary Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Birmingham.
My research has focused on populism in Italy and Western Europe, political parties and local democracy.
In 2008, Daniele Albertazzi and I co-edited the volume Twenty-First Century Populism which looked at the structural opportunities for populism in a series of countries and how populist parties had exploited these. Since 2008, Albertazzi and I have conducted extensive research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on populist parties in Italy and Switzerland. This has included over 100 interviews with representatives and ordinary party members in the two countries, along with analysis of party organization, policies, electoral performances and communications. A book entitled ‘Populists in Power’, based on the project, will be published by Routledge.
Thanks to a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, I am currently working at the European University Institute on comparative populist party organization and representation in Italy and a series of other European countries. In addition to the above book projects, my work on political parties and populism over the past three years has been published in the international journals Political Studies, West European Politics and Party Politics.