PhD in Global Histories, Cultures, and Politics

The PhD programme is characterized by a global and interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of historical and social processes. The "global" is not merely understood as a wider geographical scale, but rather as an epistemic device leading the study of the present and the past. "Globalization" is therefore not taken as something given but as a set of processes, whose variable combination is necessarily the effect of the action of specific political, social, and economic forces that attract investigation through the interaction of multiple disciplinary approaches.
Historiography - touching upon topics transversal to different ages such as political, economic, social, and religious history, history of ideas, institutions, settlements, gender history - meets area and oriental studies to grasp the polycentric of global spaces traversed by transnational flows of people, ideas, and commodities. Intellectual and conceptual history, pursued in a non-Eurocentric perspective and attentive to theoretical traditions that have remained marginal in political, social, and cultural studies, allows an analysis of the prospects and limits of Western grand narratives. Anthropology, through a peculiar ethnographic sensitivity, demonstrates how phenomena with a global scope inscribe onto the concreteness of social actors’ experience. Political philosophy, understood as critical theory and entering constant dialogues with such approaches as cultural, postcolonial, and gender studies, provides the conceptual and analytical framework that is needed for the production of a global political theory. Geography provides the language and the methods that allow grasping and representing the multiple spatial and territorial frame within which the investigated processes develop – with a specific focus on "trans-scalarity".