Role
Full Professor of History and Politics of the United States of America at the School of Political Science of the University of Bologna - Coordinator of the Center for United States Studies – LAB-USA and Member of the Steering Committee of the Il Mulino Association.
Bio
After graduating with honors from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Florence with a thesis in American History, Raffaella Baritono earned a PhD in American History from the University of Genoa in 1992. In 1993, she was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bologna. At the same university, she won the competition for a university researcher in the SPS/05 sector, and then, starting in 2003, for an associate professorship. Having obtained her national qualification, she finally assumed the full professorship starting in 2019.
Raffaella Baritono has had various research and training experiences abroad: at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; at the Salzburg Global Seminar ; at the Fulbright American Studies Institute, organized by Southern Illinois University; and at the Roosevelt Institute in New York. She has spent research periods in New York, Bloomington (IN), Oxford, London, and Middelburg (NL).
Throughout her career, she has held numerous positions: she was president of the Italian Society of Women Historians and vice president of AISNA (Italian Association of North American Studies). She served on the board of SISI (International Historical Society) and directed CISPEA (Interuniversity Center for Euro-American History and Politics).
Her commitment has also been evident in the publishing field: she served as co-director of Ricerche di Storia Politica, recognized as a Tier A journal for Areas 11 and 14, and served on the editorial boards of Ricerche di Storia Politica and Scienza&Politica for the publishing house Il Mulino. She is a member of the Culture and Politics Association of the publishing house of the same name.
She was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Genesis and of the series of the Italian Society of Historians, in collaboration with the publishing house Viella.
Her media role has seen her collaborate on some historical programs, and in particular she has worked for “Past and Present” and previously “Time and History”, and “Correva l'anno”, all produced by Rai 3- Rai Storia.
She has been and continues to be a commentator on various television and radio programs, where she discusses topics related in particular to US politics.
Raffaella Baritono's main research areas have focused since the beginning of her career on the social sciences and state-building in the United States. She has also studied industrial democracy and participatory democracy in American progressivism within the context of US political history.
She has explored the themes of democracy and pluralism in the managerial thought of Mary Parker Follett and female leadership in nineteenth-century democracy in the United States. She has focused her research on the figures of first ladies in the American presidency, particularly that of Eleanor Roosevelt, between liberalism, internationalism, and commitment to human rights.
Always following her interest in women and their emancipation, she studied the birth of the American suffragist movement and in particular the Seneca Falls convention, American feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequently the international women's movements and recently African-American and post-colonial feminism.