Francesca Fuoli
Francesca Fuoli is a historian of modern Afghanistan, South Asia and modern European empires. She studied international relations in Trieste and specialised in South Asian law, politics and anthropology in London. She holds a PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for which she researched the impact of British colonialism on Afghanistan’s state-building process in the late nineteenth century.
She worked as a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2017 and has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern since January 2018.
Her current research project explores the role of mountain regions and mountain people in shaping the modern world from a global perspective. She is particularly interested in the connected and entangled histories that linked these regions and people during the long nineteenth century and their role in the formation and consolidation of modern nations and empires.
Title Dissertation
Colonialism and state-building in Afghanistan: Anglo-Afghan cooperation in the institutionalisation of ethnic difference, 1869-1900
Research project
Europe’s contested mountain frontiers: connections and entanglements in the Italian, British and French Empires, 1815-1915
Research Foci
Colonialism | frontiers and borderlands | sovereignty and empire | indirect rule | margins and peripheries | rebellions and brigandage
Publications
Incorporating north-western Afghanistan into the British empire: experiments in indirect rule through the making of an imperial frontier, 1884-87. Afghanistan (vol. 1, no. 1, April 2018)
‘The Mohmands’. Encyclopaedia of Islam; Fourth edition. Leiden: Brill [forthcoming]
‘Badakhshan’. Encyclopaedia of Islam; Fourth edition. Leiden: Brill [forthcoming]
