Director

DARIO GAGGIO

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH | CURRICULUM VITÆ

 

Dario Gaggio is the director of the Center for European Studies-European Union Center and associate professor in the history department at the University of Michigan. He was born and raised in Florence, Italy, and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His research areas are modern European history, with an emphasis on Italy; history and political economy; and labor and business history. He is particularly interested in facilitating interdisciplinary dialogues between history and other social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. He teaches courses on modern Europe, as well as on the history of European integration and the history of technology.
 
His previous research project, which culminated in the publication of In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns (Princeton University Press, 2007) tells the history of three northern Italian towns specializing in the production and export of gold jewelry in the twentieth century. This story challenges and refines several social scientific concepts, including social capital, embededdness, and the informal economy, while complicating facile contrasts between tradition and modernity, as well as between northern and southern Italy.
 
His current project is a historical reconstruction of the political economy of the Tuscan rural landscape from the fascist period to the 1990s. The tentative title is "In the Shadow of the Tuscan Sun. Agriculture and the Landscape Beautiful from Fascist Ruralism to Rural Tourism." The goal of the project is to examine the historical processes that have led to the fetishization of the Tuscan landscape as a place of beauty and harmony between social classes and between "man" and "nature." In so doing, the project also intends to redefine the notion of landscape by interpreting it as the narratives about space and time historical actors tell in their struggles over material and immaterial resources.
 
Main publications:
 
"In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns." (Princeton University Press, 2007)
 
"Negotiating the Gold Standard: The Geographical and Political Construction of Gold Fineness in Twentieth-Century Italy." Technology and Culture, 43 (2002): 291-314
 
"Do Social Historians Need Social Capital?" Social History 29 (2004): 499-513
 
"The Politics of Tacit Knowledge: Skill Formation in Two Italian Gold Jewelry Towns during the Post-World War II Economic Miracle," in Natasha Coquery, Liliane Hilaire-Oerez, Line Sallmann and Catherine Verna (eds.), Artisans, Industrie. Nouvelles Révolutions du Moyen Age à Nos Jours, Paris: Ecole Normale Superieure Editions, 2004, pp. 441-451
 
"Pyramids of Trust: Embeddedness and Economic Change in two Italian Gold Jewelry Districts," Enterprise and Society 7 (2006): 19-58, winner of the 2006 Newcomen Prize in business history.