Dr Michele Sollai ·

Post-doctoral researcher

Michele Sollai is a postdoctoral researcher in the SNSF project “Organized Business and Environmental Governance in Western Europe, 1945-1995” at UniDistance Suisse. He obtained his PhD in 2022 from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Before joining UniDistance, he held SNSF-funded postdoctoral fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center, Sciences Po, and the University of Zurich.

Michele’s research expertise lies at the intersection of environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the global history of science and technology. He has worked extensively on the transnational history of development and modernization, with a particular focus on Italy and (post-)colonial Africa.

Currently, he is researching environmental politics in 1970s Italy, focusing on the role of Confindustria, Italy’s leading business association.

Publications

In preparation	“Courtiers of Ecology: Organized Business and Environmental Politics in 1970s Italy”, Journal of Contemporary European History.
2025	“Where Europe Ends, Where Africa Begins: Transimperial Dryland Science in the Italian South (1900s-1940s), Journal of Global History. Published online 2025:1-22. doi:10.1017/S1740022825000105
2025	(with Diana Méndez-Rojas) “Transnational Circulation of the Green Revolution”, Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental History. Published online 2025. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780197768709-0036
2024	“The Fascist Green Revolution”, Plants, People, Planet 6, no. 5: Special Issue: “The history of crop science and the future of food”, ed. Helen Anne Curry and Ryan Nehring (2024): 1094-1103. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10386
2022	“How to Feed an Empire? Agrarian Science, Indigenous Farming, and Wheat Autarky in Italian-occupied Ethiopia (1937-1941), Agricultural History 96, no. 3 (2022): 379-416. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-9825310
2021	“Microcosms of Colonial Development: Italian and Ethiopian Farmers at the Crossroads of Fascist Empire Building (1937-1941)”, Contemporanea 24, no. 1 (2021): 79-101. doi: 10.1409/100257

Research focus

Environmental politics
Water & aridity
Climate change adaptation
International Development
The Green Revolution
Fascism

Research projects

Organised Business and Environmental Governance in Western Europe [1945-1995]

Approved amount: 822169 CHF

Funding scheme: FNS - Project funding

Pitteloud Sabine // Sollai Michele // Denzer Naomi

Status: Ongoing

Start: 01.03.2025

End: 28.02.2029

History