Francesco Di Palma is Associate Professor at the University of Vienna. He studied History and Linguistics at the University of Bologna and at the University of Leipzig. Di Palma graduated with a degree in Contemporary History in 2004 and received his PhD from the Freie University (Berlin) in 2007. He went on to teach at the same university, as well as at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017) and, since 2020, at the University of Vienna, where he was awarded the Venia Legendi in Modern and Early Modern History in the same year. He has published widely on European socialism and communism, Italian history, fascism and antifascism, and cultural and Jewish history. Since June 2022 he has been researcher at the German Historical Institut in Rome in the project "Re-Konstruktionen des Deutsch-italienischen wissenschaftlichen Forums für Zeitgeschichte und Politik", in collaboration with Villa Vigoni and financed by the BMBF (federal ministry of public instruction), with a research project "On the 'Transformation' of the New Political Elites in Italy – from the 1990s until today".

Main research interests
History of the two German States; social and political history of Western Europe (20th/21st century); history of Socialism and Communism in Europe; Italian history (20th/21st century); Fascism/Antifascism; Jewish history (19th/20th century); european cultural history (19th/20th century); intellectual history