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Department of History

Professor Giorgio Riello

Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick currently on secondment to the Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence (2019-24). Before moving to the EUI, he was Director of Warwick in Venice (2018-19), Director of the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study (2014-17) and Chair of the Pasold Research Fund (2016-19).

He is the author of Back In Fashion: Western Fashion Since the Middle Ages (Yale UP, 2020); Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford UP 2016, co-authored with P. McNeil); Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge UP 2013, Pb 2015; winner of the World History Association Bentley Prize 2014); La Moda (Laterza, 2012; rev. ed. 2021); and A Foot in the Past (Oxford UP, 2006). He has co-edited more than a dozen books and special issues of journals. Giorgio has published extensively on the history of material culture, trade and consumption in early modern Asia and Europe. In 2011 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize. Between 2013 and 2015 he was the coordinator of the Leverhulme-funded ‘The Luxury Network’ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/go/luxury/. In 2016 he was awarded the Iris Foundation Award for his contribution to the field of Decorative Arts and Material Culture.

He is co-writing (with Dagmar Schaefer, Max Planck Institute, Berlin) a book entitled 'Cultures of Innovation: Silk in Pre-Modern Eurasia'. He is developing a project entitled "The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism: European Factories of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800" considering the system of trade and information exchange in the Indian Ocean. With Paula Findlen (Stanford), Brian Brege (Syracuse) and Luca Mola' (Warwick), he coordinates the project 'Carletti's World: An Early Modern Global Voyage'.

Academic Profile

Recent Research Grants and Collaborations

Riello a member of the Academic Board of the Museum of London (2016- ); and was a member of the advisory boards of The V&A Research Institute Pilot Project (2014-16); the HERA Project 'The Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and Connections in the Fashion Industry since 1945' (2013-16); the HERA Project 'Fashioning the Early Modern' (2010-13); the ESRC Research Project Footwear, Identity and Transition' (2010-12), the AHRC International Network 'Routes, Networks & Communities in the Early Medieval Indian Ocean' (2011-13).

Prizes and Fellowships

Professional Membership

PhD Supervision and PostDoctoral Mentoring

Past PhD researchers supervised at Warwick are:
- Dr Emma Markiewicz (Hair and Wigs in the 18th century - completed Dec. 2014).
- Dr Karolina Hutkova (The Bengal Silk Trade and the East India Company, 1757-1812 - completed Sept. 2015)
- Dr Serena Dyer (The Vilified Consumer: Female Consumers and Fashion in 18th-Century England - completed Sept. 2016).
- Dr Rachael Morton (Marking and the Quality of English Metalware, c. 1675-1750 - completed Jan. 2017).
- Ms Jo Tierney (The Design and Trade of British Textiles to West Africa, c. 1830-1914) - with Professor David Anderson (completed July 2019).
- Ms Tabitha Baker (The Embroidery Trade in Eighteenth-Century France) - AHRC Collaborative Award co-supervised with Professor Lesley Miller, V&A (completed July 2019).
He is currently supervising 9 PhD students at the EUI, among whom former Warwick undergraduates and master students.

Publications

Books
 
 
 
 
 

Edited Books and Catalogues

  • (eds.) Global Design History (Basingstoke: Routledge, 2011), hb & pb 226pp., 35 B/W illustrations (with Glenn Adamson and Sarah Teasley)
  • (eds.) Moda: Storia e Storie (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2010), pb 249pp., 25 B/W illustrations. (with M. G. Muzzarelli and E. Tosi Brandi)
  
Articles
  • 'The art and science of walking: mobility, gender and footwear in the long eighteenth century', Fashion Theory, 9/2 (2005), pp. 175-204 (with P. McNeil) translated into Russian as ‘Peshie progulki kak nauka i iskusstvo: gender, prostranstvo i modnoe telo v "dolgom vosemnadzatom veke’, Teoria Mody, 1/2 (2007), pp. 127-162; translated into German as ‘Kunst und Wissenschaft des Gehens: Geschlecht, Raum und Eleganter Körper im Verlängerten 18. Jahrhundert’, in Anna-Brigitte Schlittler and Katharina Tietze (eds.), Kleid und Raum (Zürich, 2009), pp. 14-30.
  • ‘Dal Consumo di Massa alla Produzione in Serie: Il Caso del Calzaturiero Inglese in Età Moderna’ [‘From Mass Consumption to Mass Production: The Case of the Boot and Shoe Sector in Early Modern England’], Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 36 (2002), pp. 281-304.
  • ‘La Società del Consumo nell’Inghilterra del Settecento: Trent’anni di Studi’ [‘The Consumer Society of Eighteenth-Century Britain: Thirty Years of Research’], Ricerche di Storia Sociale e Religiosa, 55 (1999), pp. 41-66.
 
Chapters in Books
  • ‘Fashion and the Four Parts of the World: Time, Space and Change in the Early Modern Period’, in Miki Sugiura, ed., Linking Cloth/Clothing Globally. The Transformations of Use and Value, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Tokyo: Hosei University, 2019), pp. 133-159.

  • 'Introduction: The Global Lives of Things', in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds.), The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the First Global Age (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1-27.

  • ‘Global objects: Contention and Entanglement’, in Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press and The British Academy, 2013), pp. 177-193. (with Glenn Adamson)

  • ‘From India to the World: Cotton and Fashionability’, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 145-170. (with Prasannan Parthasarathi)

  • ‘La storia che verrà: verso una storia globale della moda’ [And History will Come: Towards a Global History of Fashion] and ‘L’oggetto di moda: tre approcci per la storia della moda’ [‘Fashion Objects: Three Approaches to the Study of the History of Fashion’], in Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Giorgio Riello and Elisa Tosi Brandi (eds.), Moda: Storia e Storie (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2010), pp. 30-43 and 131-143.
  • 'The Italian Textile Industry: Technology, Labour and Innovation, 1650-2000', in Lex Heerma van Voss , Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds.), The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers (Aldeshot: Ashgate, 2010) (with G.L. Fontana and W. Panciera), pp. 275-304.

  • ‘Storia della scarpa in Italia dal Settecento a oggi’ [The Production of Footwear in Italy from the Eighteenth Century to the Present], in Maria Canella and Elena Puccinelli (eds.) La misura dell'eleganza. Storia della calzoleria artigianale a Milano tra XIX e XX secolo (Milan:Lucini Libri, 2009), pp. 55-140. (with G. L. Fontana)
  • 'Things that Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives', in Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 24-47; re-printed in A.F. Garçon, A. Cardoso de Matos, and G. L. Fontana (eds.), Techniques, patrimoine, territoires de l'industrie: quel enseignement? (Lisbon: Ediçoes Colibri, 2010), pp. 163-190.
  • ‘Walking the Streets of London and Paris: Shoes in the Enlightenment’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006) (with P. McNeil).
  • ‘Counting Sheep: A Global View on Wool, 1800- 2000’, in Giovanni Luigi Fontana and Gérard Gayot (eds.), Wool: Products and Markets, 13th-20th century (Padua: CLEUP, 2004), pp. 113-136.
  • ‘Dopo le Corporazioni: Protezione, Innovazione e Competizione Internazionale nel Settore Calzaturiero Londinese nel Primo Ottocento’ [After the Guilds: Protection, Innovation and International Competition in the London Footwear Sector in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Paola Massa and Angelo Moioli (eds.), Dalla Corporazione al Mutuo Soccorso. Organizzazione e Tutela del Lavoro tra XVI e XX Secolo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004), pp. 425-444.
  • ‘The Shaping of a Family Trade: The Cordwainers’ Company in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Ian Gadd and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450-1800 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2002), pp. 141-159.
  • 'La Camera di Commercio Italiana per il Regno Unito’ [‘The Italian Chamber of Commerce in the UK’], in Emilio Franzina (ed.), Profili di Camere di Commercio Italiane all’Estero (Milan: Rubettino, 2001), pp. 65-83.
 
Working Papers 
Other Publications
  • ‘Foreword’, in Francesca Bray, Peter A. Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black, and Dagmar Schaefer, eds., Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. xiii-xix.
  • ‘Shopping and Walking: Buying Shoes in Eighteenth-century London’, Footnotes: The Quarterly Magazine of the Bata Shoe Museum (Toronto), Winter issue (2001), p. 7.
  • ‘The Crisis of the London Boot and Shoe Trade and Parisian Fashion, 1815- 50’, in The Economic History Society Annual Conference Programme (Bristol: EHS, 2000), pp. 31-38.

 

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