
Dr Lorenzo Costaguta
MA, MSc, PhD, BA
Expertise
I am a scholar of ideas of race and class, with a particular interest in the history of socialism in the United States and Western Europe.
Current positions
Senior Lecturer
Department of History (Historical Studies)
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
I am an historian of race and class with a specialism on the history of U.S. and European socialist movement. My first monograph, Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (Illinois University Press, 2023), uses a multi-lingual archival basis to offer the first history socialism and race in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book adopts a transnational approach, exploring the role of European immigrants (in particular from Germany) in shaping American socialist racial thought.
Stemming from my first book is my current research project, a history of ideas of race and class in the Socialist International (1889-1914). My aim is to rearticulate the history of global socialism at the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of race studies and studies of imperialism and colonialism. The 1890-1914 period saw the rise of Jim Crow in the United States, the explosion of antisemitism in Europe, and the consolidation of Western empires in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Yet historians have never studied the interrelated development of ideas of race and class in organized working class movements in this crucial moment of transition. This project identifies the socialist Second International as one of the first transnational spaces of confrontation on ideas of race for workers across the world.
I serve as coordinator of the working group on Labour and Empire within the European Labour History Network (https://socialhistoryportal.org/elhn/wg-empire) and I am an elected member of the Board of the Italian Association for North American Studies (AISNA - https://www.aisna.net/current-board/). I held visting fellowships at the John W. Kluge Center (Library of Congress), the British Library and the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi (Turin). I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
AH/Y505134/1 A Socialist Empire of Freedom: Race and Class in the Second International
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of History (Historical Studies)Dates
01/10/2023 to 31/12/2023
Publications
Recent publications
21/03/2023Workers of All Colors Unite
Workers of All Colors Unite
Before Baku
The Comintern and the Global South
Must They Go?
Contemporanea: XIXth and XXth Century History Review
Multilingualism and Transnationalism in the Study of Socialist Movements
RSA Journal
“Geographies of Peoples”: Scientific Racialism and Labor Internationalism in Gilded Age American Socialism
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Teaching
Units I taught this year include:
- The American Empire (Level 3)
- The American Civil War (Level 2)
- Capitalism (Level 3)
- The American Century (Level 1)
- Approaching the Past (Level 1)
- Modern World (Level 1)
Across my academic career, I designed and delivered teaching on a variety of US-related subjects, including the Sixties, mass culture in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, the history of American radicalism, the African American experience from 1619 to today.