Raffaella Bianchi
I am a cultural historian interested in identities (national, gender, ethnicity...), music and politics, the history of theatres and the sociology of the performing arts. My book on the role of La Scala in the Risorgimento was published by Brepols Publishers, and I wrote extensively on the relations between music and politics in Turkey.
I also enjoy participating in public history projects, particularly because my favourite research methods are interviews (oral history) as well as archive research.
My research focuses on the Mediterranean area, in particular on Italy and Turkey, the two countries where I lived and worked, apart from England, where I wrote my Ph.D and began my academic career.
I was awarded a PhD from the Department of Politics, History and International Relations of Loughborough University, entitled: 'The Political Role of the Risorgimento: Hegemony and Subversion (1814-1848)'. I furthered this research by comparing the role of opera in the identity construction of Italy and Turkey, and published an article on this topic. This opened up possibilities of working in Turkey; immediately after completing my PhD, I moved to Southern Turkey (Zirve University, Gaziantep) and then to Istanbul (Suleyman Sah University), where I worked as an Assistant Professor in Political Science. In 2015, due to the lack of freedom of speech (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/reports_institutions/suleyman-sah-university/), I left Istanbul.
I was an associate professor in Istanbul during the so-called Arab Springs; this allowed me to conduct research and publish an article in the journal Popular Music on the role of music in constructing the identity of the Gezi Park movement.
After living in Turkey, I worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Politics and IR of the University of Westminster, was a Staff Member of UCL, held some teaching positions on history, and was a Research Fellow at REDESM International Research Centre in Religion, Law and Economy in the Mediterranean Area (Università dell'Insubria).
Currently, I am a permanent teacher of history and Italian literature to adults, and am working on a project of public history, constructing the archive for the history of the Internet in Italy for ITNOG (the Italian Network Operators Group). My article on the first xxv years of NAMEX (Rome Internet Exchange) was published in Ricerche Storiche.
Lately, I have contributed to two volumes on history and music: the first one was edited by James Garret on musical censorship, and I wrote a chapter on the history of censorship in Turkiye vis-à-vis republican and contemporary nationalism; the second is forthcoming on a volume on music & politics in Turkiye and is about authoritarian populism and music. I also published an article on the impact of Turkish TV series as feminist/feminin models internationally for a special issue of Genesis (the journal of the Association of Women Historians in Italy).
I am an Italian native speaker, I am fluent in English, and I speak and read French well. I also have a working knowledge of Spanish, and I know some Turkish.
Supervisors: Martha Worsching; Ruth Kinna; Robert Knight
I also enjoy participating in public history projects, particularly because my favourite research methods are interviews (oral history) as well as archive research.
My research focuses on the Mediterranean area, in particular on Italy and Turkey, the two countries where I lived and worked, apart from England, where I wrote my Ph.D and began my academic career.
I was awarded a PhD from the Department of Politics, History and International Relations of Loughborough University, entitled: 'The Political Role of the Risorgimento: Hegemony and Subversion (1814-1848)'. I furthered this research by comparing the role of opera in the identity construction of Italy and Turkey, and published an article on this topic. This opened up possibilities of working in Turkey; immediately after completing my PhD, I moved to Southern Turkey (Zirve University, Gaziantep) and then to Istanbul (Suleyman Sah University), where I worked as an Assistant Professor in Political Science. In 2015, due to the lack of freedom of speech (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/reports_institutions/suleyman-sah-university/), I left Istanbul.
I was an associate professor in Istanbul during the so-called Arab Springs; this allowed me to conduct research and publish an article in the journal Popular Music on the role of music in constructing the identity of the Gezi Park movement.
After living in Turkey, I worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Politics and IR of the University of Westminster, was a Staff Member of UCL, held some teaching positions on history, and was a Research Fellow at REDESM International Research Centre in Religion, Law and Economy in the Mediterranean Area (Università dell'Insubria).
Currently, I am a permanent teacher of history and Italian literature to adults, and am working on a project of public history, constructing the archive for the history of the Internet in Italy for ITNOG (the Italian Network Operators Group). My article on the first xxv years of NAMEX (Rome Internet Exchange) was published in Ricerche Storiche.
Lately, I have contributed to two volumes on history and music: the first one was edited by James Garret on musical censorship, and I wrote a chapter on the history of censorship in Turkiye vis-à-vis republican and contemporary nationalism; the second is forthcoming on a volume on music & politics in Turkiye and is about authoritarian populism and music. I also published an article on the impact of Turkish TV series as feminist/feminin models internationally for a special issue of Genesis (the journal of the Association of Women Historians in Italy).
I am an Italian native speaker, I am fluent in English, and I speak and read French well. I also have a working knowledge of Spanish, and I know some Turkish.
Supervisors: Martha Worsching; Ruth Kinna; Robert Knight
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Papers by Raffaella Bianchi
It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with
ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians
and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey’s cultural
changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action
and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even
became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi
Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.
Book Reviews by Raffaella Bianchi
Books by Raffaella Bianchi