Laura Popa

I am an international Ph.D. candidate in History and Cultural Studies and a recipient of the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst scholarship. During my master's and bachelor's years, I studied History, History of Religions, and Philosophy at Università degli Studi di Torino & Università degli Studi di Perugia in Italy, as well as at Universitatea "Al. I. Cuza" Iaşi in Romania. My perspective on life is to learn as much as possible about the world, people, and cultures. As a result, I consider myself a global citizen.

The dissertation project I am currently working on is called Protestant Women Teachers in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Nation-State Building at the Crossroads of Gender, Culture, and Religion, 1860-1915, which investigates for the first time how a group of minority Protestant women tried to build the Italian nation through professional teaching and missionary activities. Its primary focus is on the history of native Italian Protestant women who taught elementary school in post-unification Italy as part of the Waldensian Church's evangelization effort. After the unification of Italy, religious dissidents were freed from centuries of persecution and exile in the Waldensian Valleys to reach out to the new Italian nation outside their so-called ghetto. To contribute to nation-building, the Church opened elementary schools in Italy and mainly sent women to teach. 

The objective of this project is threefold. First, through a prosopographic analysis, it explores three generations of elementary school teachers within Waldensian communities of diaspora as they evolved from evangelization, with a specific focus on their religious conversion and its consequences (e.g., discrimination) and gender relations. Second, by following their professional and missionary activities and mobility, this study aims to demonstrate how the entanglements of gender, cultural, and religious identities made them act as hybrids (in a sense given by Homi Bhabha and Pnina Werbner) in the Italian nation-state building (seen as third space), thus contributing to its religious and cultural diversity. Third, it examines how Protestant teachers perceived the concept of nation, their political opinions, and their role in the creation and development of Italian national school education.

In this project, I argue that the Protestant faith-based mission for evangelization was the primary motivator for Waldensian women teachers' entry into the public sphere through professional teaching, the same way their counterparts in other Protestant countries did. This demonstrates the global Protestant world's connections and presence even in Italy during that time. My research based on archival and press sources proposes, thus, the first attempt to analyze women's history in Italy through the lenses of the local and global interconnectedness of nineteenth-century Protestantism.

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Philipp David (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen), Prof. Dr. Martin Baumeister (Deutsche Historische Institut in Rom &  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Prof. Dr. Lothar Vogel (Waldensian Facolty of Theology in Rome)