Dr Tommaso Zerbi
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

- Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
- Edinburgh College of Art
- College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Contact details
- Email: tzerbi@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Minto House
20 Chambers Street - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 1JZ
Background
Dr Tommaso Zerbi is an architectural historian who specialises in responses to the past — with an emphasis on responses to the Middle Ages (medievalism) — in the modern world. He is particularly engaged in interrogating the entanglements of practices of reception and revival, and attitudes towards the pre-modern built environment, with systems of power and notions of empire, alterity, and nationhood. His past and ongoing research focuses on modern Italy, its former colonies in the African continent and the Mediterranean Basin, and Anglo-Italian relations.
Between completing a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 and returning to Edinburgh as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in 2025, Tommaso held research fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at the British School at Rome (2021), the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (2022 and 2023–2024), I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2023), and the German Historical Institute in Rome – Max Weber Foundation (2024). Prior to these, he graduated (MArch, BArch) summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano. A Research Fellow at the British School at Rome (since 2025) and a recipient of the Barrie Wilson Award from the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Tommaso earned recognition from the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and the Italian Embassy in London, among others.
While his first-book project (The Tricolour, Shield, and Cross of Savoy: Architecture, Medievalism, and the Politics of the Italian Risorgimento) scrutinises the intersections of architecture and medievalism vis-à-vis the making of Italy, his second-book project investigates their exchanges in the formation of the Italian Empire.