MSCA PF Fellow: Andrea Azzarelli

Andrea Azzarelli specialises in modern and contemporary European history, with a focus on security, policing, criminality and violence between the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. He obtained his PhD from the University of Milan in 2019 with a dissertation on police institutions and territorial control in Sicily between Italian unification and the First World War (1861-1914).

He has published widely on the history of policing, crime, political violence, and armed associations in Italy and France. His monograph Polizia, crimine e ordine pubblico in epoca liberale. Il modello nazionale e il caso della Sicilia di fine Ottocento (1861–1914) was published by Rubbettino in 2025, and his articles have appeared in journals such as European History Quarterly, French Historical Studies, Crime, History & Societies, and Contemporanea.

More recently, his research has shifted focus on the history of security as a market, examining the production, circulation, and everyday use of commercial security technologies in early twentieth-century Europe. These themes are developed in his MSCA project SEC-EUR, supervised by Blake Brown (Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada) and Marco Bertilorenzi (DISSGEA, University of Padua). Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the project examines how locks, safes, alarms, and other security devices turned security into a consumer good, reshaping ideas of property, responsibility, and protection in early twentieth-century Europe.