Dr Glauco Schettini

Glauco Schettini is an intellectual, cultural, and religious historians of early modern and modern Europe, with a specific focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is an alumnus of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, and he received his PhD from Fordham University in 2022. Before coming to Warwick, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at Yale University (2022-24) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College (2024-25).

His first book, The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780-1849, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Drawing on sources from France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and their empires, the book illustrates how Catholic reactions to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and subsequent political revolutions in the nineteenth century transformed the very nature of religion. No longer just a set of theological doctrines, Catholicism also became an ideological discourse about politics and society, capable of competing with other emerging ideologies, like liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, and socialism. By reclaiming domains increasingly identified as secular––politics, society, and the economy––Catholic thinkers invented a modern religious ideology that mobilized the masses and reshaped the church's place in society. A new word, Catholicism, emerged to describe this ideological construct.

His current book project, Power and Paranoia: A History of Conspiracy Theories, explores the development of a shared culture of conspiracy across Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It claims that while premodern times abounded with conspiracy narratives that sought to explain specific events––such as the death of a ruler, the outbreak of a war, or an epidemic––the period under analysis witnessed the emergence of world conspiracy theories––all-encompassing systems that interpreted the course of world history at large as driven by the plots of a small group seeking global domination. These theories were not aberrations, but instead reflected larger historical phenomena, including political revolutions and democratization, the rise of modern science, the emergence of capitalism, and secularization.

He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the Catholic Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the liberal revolutions of 1820 to the histories of human rights, history-writing, and urbanism. He has received fellowships and awards from a number of institutions, including the dissertation prizes of the Society for French Historical Studies and the American Catholic Historical Association.

Select Publications

Books

• The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780-1849 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Articles

• “Experimental Politics: The Middle Ages, Counterrevolutionary Catholics, and the Politics of History,” Studi storici 65, no. 4 (2024), 869-882.
• “Una rivoluzione italiana: Costruire il popolo nella Repubblica cisalpina, 1797-99,” Rivista storica italiana 134, no. 2 (2022): 595-626.
• “Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church, and the French Revolution, c.1775-1800,” Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 3 (2020): 677-705. Honorable Mention, Article Prize for Modern Italian History, Society for Italian Historical Studies (2021)
• “Building the Third Rome: Italy, the Vatican, and the New District in Prati di Castello, 1870-1895,” Modern Italy 24, no. 1 (2019): 63-79.
• “Venti lettere inedite dal carteggio Scipione de’ Ricci – Henri Grégoire,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 52, no. 2 (2016): 259-314.
• “La fucina dello spirito pubblico: L’organizzazione dei circoli costituzionali nella prima Cisalpina, 1797-1799,” Società e storia 38, no. 150 (2015): 689-719.
• “Un rito rivoluzionario: I banchetti per i poveri in Emilia e Romagna, 1797-1798,” Contemporanea 18, no. 2 (2015): 197-220.
• “‘Niente di più bello ha prodotto la rivoluzione’: La teofilantropia nell’Italia del triennio, 1796-1799,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 50, no. 2 (2014): 379-433.

Book Chapters

• “Going South: Catholics, Liberals, and the Rise and Fall of a Mediterranean Path to Revolution, 1820-23,” in Dzavid Dzanic, ed., Religion, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Empire in the Mediterranean, 1650-1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2026).
• [with Charles Walton] “Socioeconomic Rights,” in Dan Edelstein and Jennifer Pitts, eds.,The Cambridge History of Rights, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 71-92.
• “The Abbé Grégoire Eulogizes Port-Royal,” in Shaun Blanchard and Rick Yoder, eds., Jansenism: An International Anthology (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2024), 352-361.
• “Eighteenth-Century Crusaders: The War against France and the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1789-99,” in Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, and Juliette Reboul, eds., Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas, and Movements, c.1700-1930 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 152-171.
• “A Female Mystic of the Catholic Enlightenment: Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799),” in Shaun Blanchard and Ulrich Lehner, eds., The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 37-74.
• “L’Europa vista dal Mediterraneo: Idee per un nuovo ordine continentale nell’Italia di fine Settecento,” in Franco A. Cappelletti and Luisa Simonutti, eds., L’idea di Unione Europea: Dal Rinascimento al Manifesto di Ventotene (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2021), 122-152.
• “Una virtù per il popolo: Repubblica, propaganda popolare e carattere nazionale nel triennio repubblicano italiano, 1796-1799,” in Anna Maria Rao, ed., Popolo e cultura popolare nel Settecento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2020), 281-290.
• “La religione dei repubblicani: Rivoluzione e riforma religiosa nella Milano cisalpina,” in Patrizia Delpiano, Marina Formica, and Anna Maria Rao, eds., Il Settecento e la religione (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2018), 343-354.
• “Una politica delle emozioni: L’immagine del nemico nei circoli costituzionali cisalpini, 1797-1799,” in Marco Manfredi and Emanuela Minuto, eds., La politica dei sentimenti: Luoghi, spazi e canali della politicizzazione nell’Italia del lungo Ottocento (Rome: Viella, 2018), 19-37.

Room: FAB 3.48 (Faculty of Arts Building)

Phone: +44 (0)24 76524421 (internal extension 24421)

Email: Glauco.Schettini@warwick.ac.uk

Office Hours: Fridays, 9:00-10:00 and 14:30-15:30; schedule an appointment.

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