Giorgio Ennas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Utrecht (UUNL), working within the ERC Consolidator Grant project ‘Fighting Pandemics from Below: Global North-South Public Health Cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa, 1792-1942 [COOPERATION]’. In this project, his work focuses on the Sanitary Council of Tunis, the cooperation between Tunisian authorities and European agents, as in the case of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Italy. He examines how, in the nineteenth century, the political borders of the Regency of Tunis were shaped by negotiations and sanitary policies involving European consuls and physicians.
Moreover, he is an Affiliated Scholar at Franklin University Switzerland (FUS), and an Associate Researcher at the Laboratorio di Storia delle Alpi (LabiSAlp) of the University of Mendrisio. His fields of interest are the history of knowledge, diplomacy and health in the Mediterranean during the ‘long’ nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the European countries in the Balkan area and in North Africa.
Between 2017 and 2021, he was a researcher at the European University Institute in Fiesole (EUI). In June 2021, he successfully defended his dissertation entitled ‘The Mediterranean Mirror. Italo-Ottoman Relations in an Age of Transition, 1856-1871’. Among his publications are the articles ‘Connecting the Two Seas: Negotiating an International Modus Vivendi – Italian and Ottoman Diplomacies in the Suez-Red Sea Area’, ‘Negotiating Protection. The Inclusion of Ottoman-Swiss Relations in the Diplomatic Germansphere during the First World War’, and the volume Reports of Cesare Durando Italian Vice-Consul in Sarajevo (1863-1867).
Between 2021 and 2023, he worked as the Principal Investigator (PI) of a two-year project entitled ‘Pandemics and Borders. Pandemics as Driver towards Modern Borders and International Collaboration in 19th century Mediterranean and South Eastern European Periphery’ funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) (https://snis.ch/projects/study-aims-to-investigate-the-nature-scale-and-root-causes-of-missed-opportunities-for-the-detection-and-referral-of-vawg-in-primary-care-and-emergency-departments-in-tirana-albania-and-belo-horizon/). Between 2023 and 2024, he led a one-year project, also as PI, funded by the Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici (GCSS) of Rome, entitled ‘The Profession of Consul. Cesare Durando and the Professionalisation of the Consular Career of the Historic Right, 1863-1876’.