Dr Fabio Simonetti
Honorary Research Fellow - SPS

Research area(s)

• Modern History and European History
• Social and Political history, History of Emotions, Sensory History
• Oral history and autobiographical sources
• Encounters in war and occupation environments, including gendered experiences
• Twentieth-century Italy, Britain, Germany and Austria

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in understanding how war and occupation affect people’s lives and how societies respond to them by exploring wartime encounters between soldiers and civilians through the prism of autobiographical sources, material culture and artistic representations in connection with official documentation.

My first monograph - Via Tasso. Quartier generale e carcere tedesco durante l’occupazione di Roma (Odradek 2016) - explored the history and memory of Via Tasso, the Gestapo/SD HQ and prison in Nazi-occupied Rome.

My second monograph, Encounters in Wartime Italy: A Social History of Invasion, Liberation, and Occupation, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025 and explores the social dynamics of encounters between British soldiers and Italian civilians during the Second World War Allied occupation of Italy.

I have also published peer reviewed articles on the transforming impact of experiencing the 'Italian Contact Zone of occupation' on soldiers and civilians (2025), British soldiers' perception of their encounter with locals in Sicily (2022), the material culture and postmemory of the Allied occupation of Italy (2020), and the construction of a stereotyped image of the ‘enemy’ in Britain and Italy prior to the war (2020).