Leonardo Bevilacqua is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr University of Bochum. His current research project is entitled ‘Underserving of the Union: The American Idea of ‘Underclass’ in Europe, 1992-2011’ and funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Prior to his current post, he was awarded a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oxford and invited to submit his first book, Impersonal Selves: Flat Characters in the Neoliberal Novel, to Oxford University Press.
Project statement: Underserving of the Union: The American Idea of ‘Underclass’ in Europe, 1992-2011
‘Undeserving of the Union’ aims to trace the influence of the U.S.-born concept of the ‘underclass’ in post-Maastricht European politics, both at state- and Union-level. With an interdisciplinary methodology deploying tools from both social and cultural history—as well as from historical sociology—the project ultimately describes the impact of a discourse based on the demonisation of welfare recipients as a constitutive component of the class politics of deindustrialising Europe. In order to account for the transnational elements in its propagation, the exploration is taken to the three state-contexts of Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Email: leonardobevilacqua@hotmail.it
