Giovanni Orsina graduated cum laude in Political Sciences from Luiss University, Rome, where he was awarded the prize for the best Political Sciences graduate of the year 1991. He holds a PhD in History from the Third University of Rome. He is Associate Professor of Contemporary History.

He has taught at the Universities of Bologna (Forlì campus), L’Aquila, and Roma Sapienza. He was British Council Italian Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, for one academic year, and has also been Visiting Professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.

He teaches courses on the political history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe in both Italian and English at Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD levels. He has published extensively, primarily in Italian but also in other languages, on the political history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research focuses especially on the relationship between ideologies, institutions, and political conflict, with particular attention to liberalism. His work has mainly concentrated on Italian and, to a lesser extent, British history, although his research increasingly addresses the broader European context.

He has significant experience in academic and cultural management. At IMT Lucca, he is Coordinator of the PhD programme in Institutions, Politics and Policies, soon to become the PhD in Political History.

As Scientific Director of the Fondazione Einaudi in Rome since 2001, he has successfully secured and managed numerous research grants from both public and private institutions, amounting to several hundred thousand euros.

Since his university years, he has also worked as a journalist. From 2005 until May 2011, he contributed regularly to the Italian public debate as a leading writer for «Il Mattino» of Naples, the foremost newspaper in Southern Italy.