Mark Seymour
Associate Professor
History
Otago University
New Zealand
Biography
2001: Ph.D. University of Connecticut 1994: M.A. University of Connecticut 1992: B.A. (Hons), University of Sydney
Research Interest
Mark specialises in modern Italian history (19th and 20th Centuries), with a particular interest in the relationships between personal experience, politics, and modernity. His first book, Debating Divorce in Italy (Palgrave, 2006), analysed the long struggle to introduce a divorce law in Italy, using the question to explore traditional fault-lines in Italian society from new angles. In other publications he has explored foreign perceptions of Italy, the construction of Italian masculinity, feminism in Italy prior to the ‘second wave’, late nineteenth-century love letters, and historiographical 'uses' of Giuseppe Garibaldi. His current research makes microhistorical use of the records of a sensational 1879 murder trial, focusing on the history of emotions.
Publications
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Seymour, M. (2015). Personal and political: Love’s revolutions in recent historical research [Review of the books The overflowing of friendship: Love between men and the creation of the American republic; Love in the time of revolution: Transatlantic literary radicalism and historical change, 1793-1818; The English in love: The intimate story of an emotional revolution; and Love in the time of communism: Intimacy and sexuality in the GDR.]. Journal of Women's History, 27(3), 194-203. doi: 10.1353/jowh.2015.0035
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Seymour, M. (2015). After respectability: Women, sexuality and the circus in pre-sexology Italy. In V. P. Babini, C. Beccalossi & L. Riall (Eds.), Italian sexualities uncovered, 1789-1914. (pp. 80-100). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
