Publications

If you would like to read any of these items and do not have access through an institution, please email me at giovzampieri@gmail.com.

  • Recipient of the 2024 British Journal of Sociology Early Career Prize

    Sociohistorical research suggests that religious discourses and practices have been powerful in producing disciplined lines of conduct. Typically, however, this work has only considered the long-term consequences of discursive shifts or the one-sided outcomes of disciplinary practices. In contrast, this paper shows how the creative appropriation of disciplinary devices can instigate their transfiguration into additional disciplinary tools. By examining manuals for confession published in Counter-Reformation Italy, I identify three tactics via which believers allegedly approached Sacramental Penance as an impression management tool. The authors of these cultural objects detected the diffusion of these tactics and circulated their depictions to alert confessors and stigmatize believers who enacted them. These findings suggest that the theorizing of disciplining processes has to consider how the tactical appropriation of disciplinary practices can trigger processes of refraction via which their negative representations are reified and circulated as further disciplinary tools.

    • Forthcoming - “Quando i medievisti si fanno sociologi.” RM - Reti Medievali rivista.

    Starting from the discussion of Alexis Fontbonne’s recent book, Introduction à la sociologie médiévale, in this essay, I examine the proposal of considering the Middle Ages as a “model case” for sociological theorizing and a “trading zone” between medievalists and historical sociologists. I conclude by reflecting on the relationship between reflexivity and interdisciplinary research practices.

    By reviewing the books What is Religious Authority?, Repairing Infrastructures, and The Punishment of Pirates, in this essay I argue that they signal a shift toward the adoption of infrastructure as a “bridging concept” within the social sciences and the humanities. By examining how the books’ authors mobilize the notion of infrastructure in their explanatory strategies, I highlight the productivity of this concept for the analysis of social situations and the interpretations arising within them.

    Review essay on the books Under the Cover, Inside the Critics’ Circle, and Ascent to Glory, written in Italian.

    In this paper we start from Mark Solovey’s Social Science for What? to analyze the place and the role of the social sciences in the US National Science Foundation from the mid-1940s to the end of the 1980s. The book highlights the tensions that built up around the epistemic status of the social sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences and the reputational debates surrounding their role and fate during and after the postwar period. We mostly focus our attention on structures, actors and processes not addressed by Solovey: relationships, networks, and patterns of stratification within and across disciplines; the emergence of novel approaches outside the scientistic and positivistic framework sponsored by the NSF; alternative sources of funding, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities; and a set of broader, long-term processes in the macro-field of the social and behavioral sciences. We present some preliminary data suggesting that a wider, theoretically-oriented approach might be fruitful in casting a more complex and dynamic portrayal of the development of American social science.

  • A book written in Italian in which I discuss the results of an active learning strategy I helped develop and evaluate through participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and a survey.

  • Between the 16th and the 17th centuries, the production of literature on Sacramental Penance rose. Targeted to priests and penitents, manuals for confession were among the Catholic Church’s strategies to discipline its members and believers. The professional activities of penitents have been one of the dimensions on which the authors of these texts produced interpretive categories that could be used during confessions. Inspecting these sources, this chapter shows some of the research paths through which the entanglement between the ideas of labor and leisure and the religious life in the early modern Italian peninsula can be reconstructed. Having framed this literature, I show how these texts regulated work activities during the Holy days, spread representations of the sins made by professional estates, and circulated a discourse stigmatizing laziness.

    A pervasive dichotomy structures our perception of social reality: a small number of highlighted and remarkable phenomena (what we heed, the socio-cognitive spotlight) stand out against an unarticulated background (what we disregard, the socio-cognitive default). This attentional asymmetry is further consolidated by both common sense and academic thinking, since the culturally salient elements typically get more attention, while unnoticed “negative spaces” get even less. This chapter extends the scope of cultural-cognitive sociology to analyze the conceptual couple “event/infrastructure”, central in the subfield of critical event studies (CES). The seemingly inconspicuous character of infrastructures makes them what they are, in opposition to the notable perception of events - the very same dialectic central to the distinction between what is socio-culturally marked and what is socio-culturally unmarked. Moving from this theoretical stance, the chapter elaborates a typology that accounts for the intersections between events, infrastructures, and their level of markedness and semiotic weight; furthermore, it discusses empirical case studies showing how the social phenomenology of events and infrastructure, here presented, can be implemented as an analytical instrument in the toolkit of CES.

    A chapter that discusses potential strategies for creating puzzles suitable for university lectures, based on the journal articles collected and translated in the edited volume.

  • In this interview with Giovanni Zampieri, historian Giovanni Levi reflects on his intellectual career, focusing particularly on the relationship between history, sociology, and interpretive anthropology as practiced by Clifford Geertz. In the interview, Levi elaborates on debates at the intersection of these disciplines concerning comparison and generalization and the relationship between knowledge and language. These themes open new avenues for reflection at the porous borders of history and the social sciences, in continuity with the insights offered by the other contributors to “The Interpretation of Cultures at Fifty”.