Rolf Petri

Full Professor of Contemporary History (19th and 20th centuries) at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Born in 1957, in 1982 he gained the graduation in Political Science from Philipps-University of Marburg and in 1988 the doctoral degree in History and Civilization from the European University Institute in Florence. He held a fellowship of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and was a researcher, then assistant professor, at Deutsche Historische Institut (Rome), and the Universities of Bielefeld and Halle-Wittenberg. From 2006 to 2009 he coordinated the Marie-Curie Training Network European Doctorate in the Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean "Building on the Past" from 2011 to 2014 he directed Ca' Foscari School of International Relations . In 2015 he was a visiting scholar at Global and European Studies Institute of Leipzig University, and the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies of Södertörn University Stockholm. From 2016 to 2018 he was a b...

A Short History of Western Ideology: A Critical Account  ( English : Bloomsbury, 2018;  Portuguese : Bertrand, 2019) This book considers the political variety of different western ideologies only to the extent to which it is necessary for the understanding of the general argument. And its general argument is not variety, it is singularity. Throughout the text, “western ideology” is used in the singular form, in an effort to carve out in the clearest way possible the western credence in redemption through history, whatever the substitutions of specific revelations and utopias with others may have been along the path. The text discusses how Europe, and the West, became committed to fulfilling the historical assignment revealed to them by their own religious and philosophical speculations. First, they did so through a process of “Christianization”, then  “reason” and “civilization”, later “humanization,” “modernization,” the idea of “universal rights,” “globalization,” and s...

Articles and Chapters in Open Access The ‘Russian Threat’ against European Unity: Variants of an Old Tale , in Brave New Europe  January 23, 2025 Review of Sebastiano Taccola: Categorie marxiste e storiografia , in  Diacronie  58, 2024/2 Review of Vasileios Petrogiannis: European Mobility and Spatial Belongings , in  Historein  20/2, 2022 Review of David Vincent: A History of Solitude , in  Historein  19/2, 2021 L’Europa tra diritti sociali e diritto internazionale (con Maria Laura Picchio Forlati), in L'Europa a cent’anni dalla Prima guerra mondiale . Torino, Giappichelli, 2020 pp. 11-20 Sulle origini del corporativismo , in Laura Cerasi (a cura di), Genealogie e geografie dell’anti-democrazia nella crisi europea degli anni Trenta , Venezia,  Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2019, pp. 12-30 Balcani. Teleologia di una regione , in Rolf Petri (a cura di), Balcani, Europa: violenza, politica, memoria , Torino, Giappichelli, 2017, pp. 1-...