Michelguglielmo Torri

Michelguglielmo Torri, the doyen of Italian historians working on South Asia, was born on the 18th October 1945, in Novara (Italy). He graduated from the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Torino on the 30th June 1971. After his then compulsory national service, he spent the academic years 1973/74 and 1974/75 at the University of California (Berkley), doing post-doctoral research thanks to a Harkness Fellowship. He then taught at the University of Pisa and the University of Turin, where he eventually became full professor (with tenure) of «Storia e istituzioni dell’Asia» (History and Institutions of Asia) and Coordinator of the section of Oriental studies at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures. On 1st November 2015 he reached the age of compulsory retirement. He has continued his research activities as independent scholar and is the Scientific Director of the Italian think tank Asia Maior, and Director (Direttore responsabile) of the journal of the same name, published by the think tank.
His research activities have mainly been focused upon the history of the Indian subcontinent, from its origins to the present day. Such research has dwelt on the analysis of the socio-economic factors, but has not ignored the political and military ones. More specifically, he has researched the history of the Indian nationalist movement; the role played in it by Gandhi; the political, social and economic evolution of the great port city of Surat in the second half of the 18th century; and, finally, various aspects of the history of independent India, particularly Indira Gandhi’s rise to power, Indian politics in the post 1989- period, and the evolution of Indian foreign policy since 1991.
An additional field of enquiry explored by Michelguglielmo Torri since the 1980s is the Palestinian question and the Arab-Zionist conflict. Although Torri’s research production in this field has so far been limited, he has dedicated a great amount of teaching time to this topic; so much so that many of his pupils are now working in the field of Middle Eastern studies.
Michelguglielmo Torri has been one of the founders and the first president (for two consecutive mandates) of ITALINDIA (www.italindia.it), the Italian Society of Modern Indian Studies. He directs «Italindia2000», the documentation and discussion list of ITALINDIA. He is a founding member and a member of the first directive board of SeSaMO, the Italian Association of Middle Eastern studies. In December 2002 he founded «ApritiSesamo!», a list of documentation and discussion on the Middle East and the Islamic world. He was among the founding members of ASIAC, the Italian association of Central Asian studies. He was among the founding members and has been president between 2007 and 2010 of «Asia Maior» (www.asiamaior.org), an Italian think-tank concerned with Asia, conceived and founded by Giorgio Borsa. As above noted, he is presently its “Responsabile scientifico”, namely Scientific Director of the yearly journal of the same name, published by Asia Maior. Asia Maior, the journal, has been acknowledged as a class A journal in the field of Asian History by the ANVUR (the Italian authority in charge of evaluating Italian higher education and research).
Michelguglielmo Torri is Secretary-General of the Centro Studi Vietnamiti (Centre for the Study of Vietnam), Turin.
He has published both in Italian and in English. He is also editor or co-editor of some 15 collective books. His most important work is a massive 800 page-long Storia dell’India (A History of India), which was first published by the Laterza printing press in 2000 and, since then, has gone through several reprints. A new, enlarged and updated version in English has been published in India by Manohar in June 2024. The work will be published in Great Britain by Boydell and Brewer in November 2024.