
Erica Moretti is associate professor of Italian Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology–SUNY. Her research — rooted in biopolitics, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory — focuses on pacifism, refugees and displacement, and humanitarianism in Modern Italy. Moretti’s first award winning, The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children’s Rights (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), reframes Montessori’s pacifism as the foundation of her educational activism, emphasising her singular vision of the classroom as a springboard to reshaping society. She is currently working on Across the Colonial Sea: Family Reunification, Vatican Humanitarianism, and The End of Empire (1940-1950), an inquiry into how population movements (including displaced children) have tested the boundaries of diplomacy, humanitarianism, and decolonization. Taking as its departure point the children of Italian nationals in North Africa, the book examines postwar transformations in theories of kinship and of women and children’s rights, within the analytical framework of Catholic humanitarianism. This work has also been supported by an American Council for Learned Society Community College Faculty Grant, the 2023 Mercer Johnsen/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and the Peter D’Agostino Grant for the study of American Catholicism from the Culshaw Center at Notre Dame, to name a few.