Umberto Grassi is a Marie Curie Global Fellow based at the PoliTeSse Research Centre (University of Verona, Host Institution) and at the History Dpt. of the University of Maryland (Partner Institution) with the project SPACES (Sex, disPlacements and cross Cultural EnconterS, project n. 795514). Grassi is a former postdoctoral associate researcher at the Sydney node of the ARC Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions (University of Sydney). He graduated (MA) in Early Modern History in 2002 at the University of Pisa, with a dissertation focused on the control of sodomy in Early Modern Italy. Grassi continued studying this topic as a PHD student at the University of Pisa. His PHD thesis was awarded within a LGBTQ studies contest, and it has been published in 2014. In 2012 Grassi joined the research project “Beyond the Holy War” as a research fellow based at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His current research focuses on the relations between religious toleration and tolerant attitudes towards sexual and gender transgressions across the Mediterranean world.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Single-Authored Books

U. Grassi, LʼOffitio sopra l’Onestà. Il controllo della sodomia nella Lucca del Cinquecento, Milano, Mimesis, 2014 (The Office upon Honesy. The Control of Sodomy in the 16th-Century Lucca Republic), pp. 211.

U. Grassi, Sodoma. Una storia dell’omosessualità (V-XVIII sec.), Roma, Carocci (in press, accepted for publication on August 2018) (Sodom: A History of Homosexuality, 5th-18th centuries).

Edited Books

U. Grassi, V. Lagioia, G.P. Romagnani (eds). Tribadi, sodomiti, invertite e invertiti, pederasti, femminelle, ermafroditi… Per una storia dell’omosessualità, della bisessualità e delle trasgressioni di genere in Italia, Pisa, ETS, 2017 (Tribades, Sodomites, Inverts, Pederasts, Sissies, and Hermaphrodites. A History of Homosexuality, Bisexuality, and Gender Transgressions in Italy), pp. 352.

U. Grassi, G. Marcocci, eds., Le trasgressioni della carne. Il desiderio omosessuale nel mondo islamico e cristiano, sec. XII-XX, Roma, Viella 2015 (The Transgressions of the Flesh: Homosexual Desire in Muslim and Christian Worlds, 12th-20th centuries), pp. 219.

Book Chapters

 U. Grassi, Il frutto proibito. Eresia, emozioni e peccato originale nell’Italia moderna, in “Infami macchie”. Sessualità maschili e indisciplina fra XVII e XVIII secolo, edited by Fernanda Alfieri e Vincenzo Lagioia, Roma, Viella, 2017 (The Forbidden Fruit: Heresy and Original Sin in Early Modern Italy. A new History of Emotions).

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

U. Grassi, Ambiguous Boundaries: Sex Crimes and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Early Modern Mediterranean World, in Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 84/2 (2018), pp. 513-528.

U. Grassi, Sex and Toleration: New Perspectives of Research on Religious Radical Dissent in Early Modern Italy, Intellectual History Review, 29/1 (2019), pp. 129-144.

U. Grassi, Acts or Identities? Rethinking Foucault on Homosexuality, Cultural History 5.2 (2016), pp. 200-221.

Profile on the webpage of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/researchers/umberto-grassi/

Profile on the webpage of the University of Sydney
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/staff/profiles/umberto.grassi.php