Dr Tommaso Zerbi
Job title:
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow
Biography
Dr Tommaso Zerbi is an architectural historian who specialises in responses to the past — with an emphasis on responses to the Middle Ages (medievalism) — in the modern world. He is particularly engaged in interrogating the entanglements of practices of reception and revival, and attitudes towards the pre-modern built environment, with systems of power and notions of empire, alterity, and nationhood. His past and ongoing research focuses on modern Italy, its former colonies in the African continent and the Mediterranean Basin, and Anglo-Italian relations.
Between completing a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 and returning to Edinburgh as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in 2025, Tommaso held research fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at the British School at Rome (2021), the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (2022 and 2023–2024), I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2023), and the German Historical Institute in Rome – Max Weber Foundation (2024). Prior to these, he graduated (MArch, BArch) summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano. A Research Fellow at the British School at Rome (since 2025) and a recipient of the Barrie Wilson Award from the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Tommaso earned recognition from the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and the Italian Embassy in London, among others.
While his first-book project (‘The Tricolour, Shield, and Cross of Savoy: Architecture, Medievalism, and the Politics of the Italian Risorgimento‘) scrutinises the intersections of architecture and medievalism vis-à-vis the making of Italy, his second-book project, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, investigates their exchanges in the formation of the Italian Empire.
Research interests
- Modern architectural cultures and past reception/revival
- Modern afterlives of the pre-modern built environment
- Architecture and modern politics
- Modern Italian architecture (Italy and its global contexts)
- Imperial and colonial built environments in the Mediterranean and Africa
‘The Colonial Middle Ages: Architecture, Revival and Italian Imperialism, 1911–36’ is a monographic project funded by an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, for which Tommaso was also appointed a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. It delves into the entanglements between architecture and the reception, revision, and resurgence of the medieval past as they unfolded in the construction of the Italian Empire. Italian colonialism often conjures up fascism, which in turn primarily evokes modernity and classicism. This endeavour offers a counter-narrative, bringing the medievalisms of colonialism to the fore. Problematising prevailing associations of imperialism with post-medieval history, along those of the built environment from the first half of the twentieth century with Modernism, it shines a spotlight on the intersections of architecture, responses to the Middle Ages, and cultural politics. By focusing on the period of empire-building from the Italo-Turkish War to Benito Mussolini’s imperial proclamation, the African continent and the Mediterranean Basin are examined as critical domains for architectural imagining. The project’s objectives include interrogating the contribution of revivalism to affirmations of systems of power, fabrications of secular and religious identities, and notions of otherness.