Biography
Noelle Turtur is a historian of capitalism and imperialism. She studies migration and imperialism primarily through the lens of business history. Her work uses Italy as a case study to examine the respective powers of the nation-states, citizens, and subjects, the different ways states exercise power beyond their borders, and the transformation of imperial power over time. Currently a Max Weber Visiting Fellow, she previously held a Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI and the Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Fellowship at UCLA. She received her doctorate in History from Columbia University in 2022.
She is revising her manuscript, Making Fascist Empire Work: Italian Enterprise, Labor, and Community in Occupied Ethiopia, 1922-1943, based on her multi-award-winning dissertation. A study of businesses and everyday life in Italian East Africa, her book demonstrates how the regime poured into the empire and developed the new corporatist tools to harness private enterprise and labour. It reveals that, for all the regime’s violence and ambition, its empire was built with the expertise and capital of Africans, Italians, and the Horn’s diasporic communities. Her work on the political economy of fascist imperialism appears in the Business History Review, and she has a chapter on fascist “corporatist colonialism” in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonisation.
She teaches interdisciplinary courses on imperialism, migration, political economy, and political philosophy, including “Empires of Profit” and “Migration and the Making of Modern Europe” at UCLA, and “Contemporary Civilizations” at Columbia.