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About
Dr Edoardo Vaccari is a historian of political and cultural ideas, specializing in the interwar and transwar periods. He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2025, with a dissertation titled The Ventotene Moment: Justice, Liberty, and European Federalism in the Political Thought of Third Force Socialism (1929–1954). This work traces the efforts of Italian socialist exiles to rethink democracy in Europe through a federalist lens. Rather than portraying wartime Europeanism merely as a precursor to the European Union, Vaccari emphasizes its origins as a complex, anti-totalitarian experiment forged in exile and persecution.
Edoardo’s current research examines how intellectuals, writers, and artists used symbolic, religious, and allegorical forms to articulate new moral and political imaginaries from the interwar period through the early postwar years. From parable-like novels and mystical essays to spiritually-inflected modernist painting, he investigates how sacred languages were mobilized to confront the crises of modernity and totalitarian politics.
Edoardo has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, alongside pieces for The Conversation, Pandora Rivista, and the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. He is currently editing a special issue of History of European Ideas based on the 2024 conference Socialist Ideas of Europe in the World, which he convened.
Before joining LSE’s doctoral program, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Bologna and a master’s in European history from Columbia University. He has taught widely in both the US (CUNY) and the UK (LSE, City St George), covering courses on modern international political history, interwar culture, and the history of political ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Key Expertise: International History; Intellectual and Cultural History; History of European Federalism; Interwar and Transwar Europe; History of Antifascism and Exile; Modern Religion.