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Melissa Calaresu is a cultural historian originally trained in the history of political thought, holding a PhD from Cambridge and undergraduate and Master's degrees from Canada. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersections of material culture, the urban environment, and the history of ideas in early modern Italy. She is currently writing a cultural history of the urban experience, centering on the Welsh landscape artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803) during his time in Rome and Naples in the 1780s. Throughout her career, Calaresu has engaged with public history through exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum and has published extensively on topics such as the history of ice and ice cream in eighteenth-century Naples, as well as the commodification of food in early modern Rome. Her research interests include urban space representation, street food history, and collecting historical writing in Italy and Spain. Calaresu has also collaborated on several interdisciplinary research projects, co-editing volumes and organizing international conferences on topics related to food and cultural history. She has taught multiple undergraduate and graduate courses in early modern history and actively supervises doctoral research on themes related to culture, travel, and food.
University of Cambridge • Cambridge
Professor of History specializing in early modern cultural history, urban studies, and material culture.
Standard postgraduate requirements for Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and related humanities departments.