Project overview

  • Project Lead: Dr Selena Daly (The School of European Languages, Culture and Society-Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry)
  • Project name: The World is Our Homeland: A Global History of Italian Emigration (book)
  • Funding: Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (from 1 October 2025)

About the project

80 million people worldwide claim Italian heritage. Dr Daly will use the Leverhulme Fellowship to substantially complete her current book project: a global history of Italian emigration told from the perspective of the emigrant, from Marco Polo to today, which is under contract with Penguin Viking (US), Hodder & Stoughton (UK/Commonwealth) and Mondadori (Italy). 

Expanding the traditional temporalities and geographies of Italian emigration history and employing a ‘global microhistory’ approach, this book positions the migrant at the centre of the story, exploring how migration affected the development of Italian identity both at home and abroad over more than seven centuries. 

Selena Daly’s website.

Red and white Art Deco style building, Cinema Impero.
Leverhulme logo

Image attributions: 

  1. Cinema Impero, Asmara, Eritrea. Mheidegger, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
  2. Italian immigrants, Ellis Island New York, 1905. Lewis W. Hine (Life time: 1874-1940), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
  3. Photograph of Italian immigrants arriving in the Buenos Aires port, 1907. Archivo General de la Nación Argentina, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
  4. Little Italy, New York. Tomás Fano, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
  5. Photograph of the Marcinelle mining disaster in Belgium, 1956. Camille Detraux, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.