Chile, a political laboratory? Recent contributions in Italian historiography and academic networks

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a synthesis of Italian historical production dedicated to studying the events in Chile from the 1960s to the present.Methodologically, we have conducted several prosopographies in order to map academic networks and the participation of authors in monographs published both in the Italian peninsula and in the Andean nation during the Popular Unity period and in the following decades. We also examine the emergence and use, in the 2000s, of the conceptual category “Latin American political laboratory” within research on Chile in the Italic context. Regarding the sources used, they consist of written documents gathered from various repositories, libraries and archives in Italy. The novelty of this article lies in the author’s use of field notes written during his academic training (in Rome and Naples), drawn from conversations with some of the scholars mentioned and from participant observation and action research.