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Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick, currently on secondment to the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute.^[1] At Warwick he was the Director of the Institute of Advances Study.^[2]^[3]

Main publications

Books

Back in Fashion: Wester Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)
Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
La Moda: Una Storia dal Medioevo ad Oggi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2021)
A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Edited books

Re-inventing the Economic History of Industrialization (Montreal: McGill – Queens, 2020)
Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in Global History (London: Routledge, 2020)
The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in Global Perspectives, 1200-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Global Economic History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-modern World (Woodbridge:, UK: Boydell &Brewer, 2018)
Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia ( New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the First Global Age (London: Routledge, 2015)
Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)
Global Design History (Basingstoke: Routledge, 2011)
Moda: Storia e Storie (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2010)
How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asia Textiles, 1500-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2009)

Material culture studies

Writing Material Culture History

Among his publications, Writing Material Culture History, which he edited together with Anne Gerritsen is worth mentioning. The book is presented as a handbook for understanding the new discipline, targeting both students and teachers.

The book is an anthology, whose content is divided in three parts^[4]:

"The Disciplines of Material Culture": focuses on which and how disciplines have contributed to the study of the Material Culture. To this end it uses theories from various subjects, especially archeology, art history and anthropology which played a crucial role in the involvement of historians in the Material Culture;
"The Histories of Material Culture": proposes an analysis of how Material Culture can actually help refurmulate historical narratives in totally different and intriguing ways. It should be considered that objects do not belong only to a fixed moment in the past, carring a single meaning. The role of the Material Culture is to unhinge this concept and instead interweave different level of narration;
"The Presentation of Material Culture": shows the way the new discipline interfaces with the canonical one, mainly in museum contexts where several factors come into play, for instance the narrative chosen by the curators or the designer of a specific exhibition.

The focuses in Materia Culture are artefacts, objects and the time-space connections that thet create as they move.^[4] Furthermore the new discipline tries to narrate, by decoding, the messages which objects communicate across time, about people and places, environments and interactions, about different moment in history, and about our own time^[5]. Another aspect that must be pointed out is that objects/artefacts, before their conclusive life in museums, were commodities^[4]. It means they were embedded in local and global trade, they shaped connections and tastes, saw intermediaries, buyers. They shaped the world. The relevance of this work consists in the fact that Gerristen and Riello gathered meaninful global contributions, to demonstrate that a new narrative about history is possible, combining different expertise and focusing also on different geographies.

The Global Life of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World

Even this publication is the result of the combination of several scholars. The content is divided in three main sections^[6]:

Objects of Global Knowledge
Objects of Global Connections
Objects of Global Consumption

Each section is developed through a series of case studies covering the whole world and using objects as starting point, such as Brazilian featherwork, dishes, coins, pipes, but also tobacco and coffee.

The book is a remarkable contribution to two fields, Material Culture and Global History. In addition, its importance lies in the fact that in this volume the two fields interconnect, creating a new field of study: the cases portrayed by the scholars show how the different commodities, in different time and places, have helped to delineate trajectories and connections. The study of them allows us to learn new stories, expanding more persperctives to what we already know.^[6]

References

^ "Professor Giorgio Riello". warwick.ac.uk. Retrieved 2023-06-17.
^ "Giorgio Riello". European University Institute. Retrieved 2023-06-17.
^ "IAS - Home". warwick.ac.uk. Retrieved 2023-06-18.
^ ^a ^b ^c Writing Material Culture History (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury. 2021. p. 139. ISBN 978-1-350-10522-5.
^ MacGregor, Neil (2013). A History of The World in 100 Objects. Penguin Books.
^ ^a ^b Gerristen, Anne, ed. (2016). The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. Routledge.

Bibliography

Gerristen, Anne; Riello, Giorgio, eds. (2021). Writing Material Culture History (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-350-10522-5.
MacGregor, Neil (2013), A history of the world in 100 objects, New York: Penguin: The British Museum: BBC Radio, ISBN 9780143124153
Gerritsen, Anne; Riello, Giorgio (2016). The Global Lives of Things : the Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781315672908.

External links

"Interview with Giorgio Riello". Materialized Identities. June 2017.