Giovanni Maria Pala

Giovanni Pala is an economic historian with an interest in Modern European History, the History of Technology, and the role of culture and information in shaping the long-term developmental trajectory of societies. He is currently using his data analysis skills and interest in digital data as a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the ERC funded GloCoBank project. International bank linkages and the revealed assumptions about market fundamentals they exemplify offer an important, and in many ways canonical, space for the study of the evolution of information structures and agents’ assumptions over a period of time spanning decades.

After studying for an undergraduate and Masters degree in Economics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa, a national honours college for the social and applied sciences, Giovanni completed an MPhil in Economic and Social History (with distinction) at Nuffield College, University of Oxford with the support of a grant from the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi and the Compagnia di San Paolo di Torino. He recently submitted his DPhil in History (History of Science and Medicine & Economic and Social History) at Magdalen College, Oxford. During the academic year 2019-2020, Giovanni was a William Alexander Fleet fellow at Princeton University where he developed his multidisciplinary research skills. 

Research interests

During his studies Giovanni developed a strong interest in the use of digital methods to extract and analyse a variety of sources, especially those that are outside of the more established text-based approaches to historical analysis. His doctoral project explores cartography in its “technological” dimension, with attention to the important years of the late 17th and the 18th century. Cartography, a hybrid of symbolic and textual representation, is approached by means of modern image-analysis techniques to analyse its precision in a large dataset of digitised maps.