Stuart Woolf

Stuart Joseph Woolf (23 January 1936 – 1 May 2021) was an English-Italian historian.

Woolf was emeritus professor of contemporary history at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he had taught from 1996 to 2006. Prior to this he taught at the European University Institute in Florence from 1984 to 1992 and at the University of Essex where he was Foundation Professor of History beginning in 1975. He previously held appointments at the University of Reading and Pembroke College in the University of Cambridge. He also held a number of visiting appointments at European, American and Australian universities, including Columbia University in New York and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

Educated at St Marylebone Grammar School he attended Merton College in the University of Oxford, graduating in 1956. Tutored by Roger Highfield and J. M. Roberts, he subsequently undertook research toward a doctoral degree under the supervision of H. R. Trevor-Roper. His research was on the domestic economic practices of three early modern aristocratic families in Piedmont during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Woolf submitted his thesis and received his DPhil in 1960. During this period he formed a close relationship with the noted scholar of the Enlightenment Franco Venturi. A year at St. Antony's College, Oxford, in the company of its warden William Deakin, combined with Venturi's influence, turned his interests to modern and contemporary history, in particular to the history of Fascism and its opponents.

In the 1970s and 1980s, while at Essex and the EUI, Woolf expanded his interests to include Europe under Napoleon, the use of statistics in the age of the French Revolution, the history of poverty, and the comparative history of Nationalism. Provided by Wikipedia