Roberta Garruccio, Ph.D. in History of European Society, is a tenured researcher in Economic History at the Department of Studies in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication – University of Milan; member of the Faculty of the Ph.D. programme in Linguistic, literary and intercultural studies in European and extra-European perspectives – University of Milan. After working in banking and business history, over the last decade she has been practicing oral history, investigating firms, organizations and markets through in depth interviews. She has been collecting several oral archives, authoring and editing related publications on behalf of several institutions. Since 2012 to 2016, she was a member of the steering committee of AISO (Italian oral history association). Since 2015, she has been working in the field of Deindustrialization studies.


Email: roberta.garruccio@unimi.it


Recent publications: 

  • Voci del lavoro. Dagli anni settanta a oggi: globalizzazione e cambiamenti in una fabbrica Pirelli, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2012
  • Chiedi alla ruggine. Studi e storiografia della deindustrializzazione, in «Meridiana», n. 85, 2016, pp. 35-60
  • (with Paola Catenaccio) The Commodification of Loss. Advertising and the Rhetorical Exploitation of Post-Industrial Narratives as Myth-Reinforcing Symbols in Crisis-Ridden America, in B. Mottura, L. Osti, G. Riboni (eds.), Media and Politics. Discourses, Cultures and Practices, 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing , pp. 411-435
  • La rivoluzione deindustriale, a cura di Roberta Garruccio e Gilda Zazzara, in «Passato e Presente», n. 105, 2018, pp. 177-203
  • Nostalgia di un futuro perduto. L’emi-vita della deindustrializzazione, in  «Le eredità delle crisi. Dalla storia al futuro, traiettorie di risposte possibili», a cura di Paolo Frascani, Collana Quaderni della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Quaderno 31, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2019, pp. 105-116.
  • ‘Engage the Popular’. Il lavoro degli studi culturali nella crisi europea, in «From the European South. Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities», n. 5, 2019, pp. 43-56
  • Le rovine industriali. Note sulla storia lunga di una fascinazione culturale nuova, in «La questione romantica. Rivista interdiciplinare di studi romantici», numero monografico dedicato a: ‘L’arte del ricordo: romanticismo e cultural memory’, vol. 12, gennaio-dicembre 2020, pp. 213-234
  • Hardly a cause for tears’, Job Insecurity and Occupational Psychology Culture in Italy. Oral Narratives from the Falck Steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan), in Stefan Berger (ed.), Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation, Oxford-New York, BerghahnBooks,  2020, pp. 160-183
  • Visualizing Deindustrial Ruins in an Oral History Project: Sesto San Giovanni (Milan), in «BIOS – Zeitschrift fűr Biographiesforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen», special issue, 2020, conference proceedings, “(Post-)Industrial Narratives: Remembering Labour and Structural Change in Oral History” , Workshop organized together with the European Labour History Network (ELHN) Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum,  Bochum 5-7 December, 2016.