Stefano Palermo

I was born and raised in Rome, Italy, and earned my BA and MA from La Sapienza University.  I am a PhD candidate in Modern European History and a 2026–27 Bilsland Dissertation Fellow.  My research interests focus on the interplay among capitalism, business activities within European integration, and identity construction during the late Cold War.

My dissertation, “Making Europeanness Through the Single Market: A History of the European Round Table for Industry, 1973–1992,” is the first archive-based history to place the ERT, a transnational network of Europe’s leading corporations, at the center of analysis, from its prehistory in the 1970s through the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.  I argue that the ERT promoted a form of “Europeanness” grounded in transnational mobility and scientific and technological cooperation aimed at producing mobile transnational Europeans who would live and work in the Single Market.

More broadly, my work contributes to the history of capitalism, business history, and the history of European integration, with particular attention to transatlantic relations and the construction of a distinct European social model.