I’m a historically oriented social scientist—or a sociologically oriented historian?

My book project, The Bureaucracy of Forgiveness, reconstructs the infrastructures of confession in late eighteenth-century Italy. Bishops could never know what happened inside confessionals, so they governed it from the doorstep, through paperwork: printed licenses, recurrent examinations, and reference letters made confessors trustworthy without making their judgments verifiable. This case opens onto a broader question: how do organizations delegate power to agents whose actions they cannot see?

In parallel collaborative projects, I study how intellectuals’ ideas become tokens and totems in scholarly debates, the relationship between funding and creativity in contemporary art, and what Italian microhistory and cultural-historical sociology have to offer each other.

I hold a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Padova. I also studied at Trento, was a Fulbright visiting researcher at Yale, and held a research fellowship at Sapienza University of Rome. My articles have been published in the British Journal of Sociology and Church History, and in 2025 I received the BJS Early Career Prize. I currently serve as Associate Managing Editor of Sociologica.

When I’m not in the archive, I’m chasing the perfect bowl of instant noodles or listening to punk rock (too loud).