Lucy Riall is an Irish historian.[1] She was a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and is currently a professor in the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence.[2]
Riall studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge. She was a lecturer in Modern European history at the University of Essex before moving to Birkbeck. Since 2004 she has been editor of the journal European History Quarterly.[3]
Among her awards are a visiting professorship at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and a senior fellowship at the University of Freiburg's Institute of Advanced Study.
One of the leading experts on modern Italy, Riall has written on nineteenth-century state-formation and nationalism in Italy and Sicily. Several of her books treat the history of the Risorgimento; Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007) examined the popular cult of Giuseppe Garibaldi as a global cultural phenomenon.[4]
Riall speaks fluent Italian and she appears frequently on Italian TV and radio (RAI) as well as on the BBC.