Dr Melissa Calaresu

I am a cultural historian who originally trained as a historian of political thought in Cambridge. My work moves between my interests in material culture and the urban environment with the history of ideas in early modern Italy. I am currently writing a cultural history of the city of Naples through the household accounts of the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803). My recent research has included the history of ice and ice-cream in eighteenth-century Naples and explores current paradigms of enlightenment historiography. This, in turn, has led to research on food-sellers in history and resulted, most recently, in a chapter on the selling of 'street luxuries' in early modern Rome. My more general research interests range from the uses and representation of urban space in the early modern period, the history of street food, eighteenth-century antiquarianism, collecting and historical writing in Italy and Spain, and travel and the Grand Tour in Europe through texts and images in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I have been involved with several collaborative research projects with colleagues in and out of Cambridge.
I have co-curated the current exhibition Feast & Fast: The art of food in Europe, 1500-1800, with Dr Victoria Avery at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which opened on 26 November 2019 and runs until 31 August 2020. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully-illustrated and research-led exhibition catalogue, a special issue dedicated to the material cultures of food in the Journal of Early Modern History in January 2020, and dedicated public programming including the co-production of two films with local community groups funded by a recent award from the Arts and Humanities Impact Fund. For more information about the exhibition and the research behind it, you can go to the early modernists' research page of the Faculty website.
This latest exhibition builds on my involvement as one of the curators of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in 2015, with Victoria Avery at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Mary Laven and Ulinka Rublack at the Faculty of History in Cambridge. That exhibition, which grew out of an undergraduate course, showcased the extraordinary collection of applied arts in the museum and placed more than 200 objects within a new cultural history of early modern Europe. For press coverage of the exhibition, see reviews in The Telegraph and The Economist as well as an interview on Woman's Hour.
An AHRC-funded network grant with Helen Hills of the University of York produced a volume of essays, entitled, New Approaches to Naples c.1500-c.1800: The power of place in 2013. This project led to the launch of a new website, Neapolitan Network and the creation of a new network of Neapolitanists working in diverse fields, including history and art history, history of science, musicology, anthropology, and urban sociology. Another research project, with Danielle van den Heuvel at the University of Kent, focuses on street-sellers in history and contemporary society. A co-edited volume entitled Food Hawkers: Selling Food in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present Day includes contributions from experts in musicology, economics, anthropology, and classics and will be published in June 2016. Other research projects include the creation and organisation, with Mary Laven and Robert Gordon, of the Cambridge Italian Research Network, which brings together researchers working on Italian topics across the university, and an on-going collaboration with colleagues working in the field of material culture studies, as the Material Culture Forum.
Finally, I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Early Modern History at the University of Barcelona in 2013 and I hope to continue collaboration with early modern Spanish historians there. I have also held a visiting fellowship at Stanford University in March 2016 and the L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Marseille in March/April 2017.
I am currently supervising Anya Ciccone for a doctoral dissertation on liberalism and education in Restoration Naples. Recent doctoral students include Lavinia Maddaluno (EUI, Florence) who wrote a dissertation on ‘Practices of science and political economy between the State of Milan and the Italian Republic (1760s-1805)’ and Felix Waldmann (Christ's College, Cambridge) on 'Antonio Genovesi, the "Scuola Genovesiana", and moral philosophy in the Kingdom of Naples, 1734-1792’.
I have supervised Master’s dissertations on a variety of subjects including travel and the Grand Tour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enlightenment and political economy in eighteenth-century Italy, royal dining in eighteenth-century England, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan painter Gaspare Traversi, and the kitchen as a space for 'knowledge-making' in England, 1700-1850.
My areas of research supervision are in early modern Italian cultural and intellectual history including travel and the Grand Tour and more general topics on early modern Naples and the history of food. I am always happy to hear from prospective graduate students interested in working on cultural, intellectual and urban history, the history of the Grand Tour, and the history of food for the M.Phil. in Early Modern History and for Ph.Ds.
I teach undergraduates across a variety of European history papers from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries with a special focus on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of Italy, Spain and France. I am particularly keen for students to use and interpret primary printed sources including contemporary literature as well as visual sources and objects. For Part I, I co-organise a Themes and Sources option on the 'History of Collecting' and, for Part II, I teach the paper on 'Material culture in the early modern world'. I am also involved with teaching for the M.Phil. in Early Modern History.
I am co-convenor of the Early Modern World Workshop and Seminar on alternate Thursdays at Gonvillle and Caius College with Cambridge colleagues in early modern European and world history. I am also co-convenor of the Eighteenth-Century Seminar on Tuesdays during term at Jesus College with Renaud Morieux.
For Michaelmas 2015, I was awarded a Mellon Teaching Fellowship at the Centre for Disciplinary Innovation at CRASSH, along with Professor John Robb in the Department of Archaeology, to teach a graduate seminar, entitled, ‘Material culture: Crossing disciplines and analysing things’.
I am a member of the Management Committees of the Centre for the Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge.
I am also a member of the Advisory Boards for ‘Disasters, Communication and Politics in South- Western Europe: The Making of Emergency Response Policies in the Early Modern Age’, an ERC-funded project at University of Naples ‘Federico II’ (2017-2021) and for the Grand Tour Digitisation Project at Stanford University (2017 to present), and a member of the Editorial Board for ‘Transferències 1400-1800’, a book series published by University of Barcelona (2017 to present).
I was elected a member of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) in 2018 and I am currently one of the editors of Global Food History published by Taylor & Francis.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Gonville & Caius College
Cambridge CB2 1TA
Key Publications
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‘Life and Death in Naples: Thomas Jones and Urban Experience in the Grand Tour (Explorer)’, in Giovanna Ceserani and Rachel Midura (eds), A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour, Part 4: Scholars’ Essays: Digitizing the Grand Tour (forthcoming Stanford 2020).
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'Cosmopolitanism and the creation of patriotic identities in the late European enlightenment: The case of Pietro Napoli-Signorelli and his Storia critica de’ teatri antichi e moderni', in Joan-Pau Rubiés and Neil Safier (eds), Cosmopolitanism and enlightenment (forthcoming Cambridge University Press 2020)
- ‘Street “luxuries” in early modern Rome’, in Sarah Carter and Ivan Gaskell (eds), The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2020). See also the translation on the Fitzwilliam Museum website of Ambrogio Brambilla's printed grid of 'Ritrato de quelli che van vendendo et lavorando per Roma con la nova agionta de tutti quelli che nelle altre mancavano sin al presente' (Rome, 1612), from the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
- Guest editor of Special Issue of Journal of Early Modern History 24/1 (2020) - there is open access to the Introduction, 'The Material Worlds of Food in Early Modern Europe' and some of the articles.
- 'Thomas Jones’ Neapolitan Kitchen: The material cultures of food on the Grand Tour', in Journal of Early Modern History 24/1 (2020), pp. 84-102.
- Feast & Fast: The art of food in early modern Europe, with Victoria Avery, Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition catalogue (Philip Wilson/Bloomsbury, 2019).
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‘Food selling and urban space in early modern Naples’, in Melissa Calaresu and Danielle van den Heuvel (eds), Food Hawkers: Selling food in the streets from antiquity to the present day (Routledge, 2016).
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‘Food hawkers from representation to reality’, with Danielle van den Heuvel, Introduction in Calaresu and Van den Heuvel (eds), Food Hawkers (Routledge, 2016).
- Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, with Victoria Avery and Mary Laven, Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition catalogue, which includes a number of single-authored section introductions and catalogue entries, as well as a full-length essay ‘“Everyday” objects and the Glaisher collection’ (Philip Wilson, 2015).
- 'Making and eating ice cream in Naples: Rethinking Consumption and Sociability in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present (2013) 220 (1): 35-78.
- ‘Collecting Neapolitans: The representation of street life in late eighteenth-century Naples’, in Melissa Calaresu and Helen Hills (eds), New approaches to Naples c.1500-c.1800: The power of place (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 175-202.
- ‘Costumes and customs in print: Travel, ethnography and the representation of street-sellers in early modern Italy’, in Joad Raymond, Jeroen Salman, and Roeland Harms (eds), ‘Not dead things’: The dissemination of popular print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp.181-209.
- ‘The Enlightenment in Naples’, in Tommaso Astarita (ed), A companion to early modern Naples (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), 405-426.
- 'Introduction' with Filippo de Vivo and Joan-Pau Rubiés, in Melissa Calaresu, Filippo de Vivo, and Joan-Pau Rubiés (eds), Exploring cultural history: Essays in honour of Peter Burke (Ashgate, 2010).
- 'Searching for a “middle class”? Francesco Mario Pagano and the public for reform in late 18th-century Naples’, in Gabriel Paquette (ed), Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830 (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 63-82.
- ‘From the street to stereotype: Urban space, travel and the picturesque in late eighteenth-century Naples’, Italian Studies 62 (2), 2007, 189-203.
- ‘Coffee, Culture and Consumption: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples’, in Filosofia, Scienza, Storia: Il Dialogo fra Italia e Gran Bretagna, (eds) Andrea Gatti and Paola Zanardi (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2005), 135-74.
- ‘Constructing an intellectual identity: Autobiography and identity in eighteenth-century Naples’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6(2), 2001, 157-177.
- ‘Looking for Virgil’s Tomb: The End of the Grand Tour and the Cosmopolitan Ideal in Europe’, in Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, (eds) Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London, 1999), 138-161
- ‘Images of ancient Rome in late eighteenth-century Neapolitan historiography’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1997), 641-661.