Luca Provenzano

Luca Provenzano is a historian of contemporary Europe focused on revolutionary politics, social movements, and state institutions during the period of student and worker agitation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Prior to joining Sciences Po as a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of European History at Wake Forest University. Dr. Provenzano earned his doctoral degree from Columbia University in June 2020. 

At Sciences Po, he is pursuing the research project The Emergence of Autonomist Politics: European Radicalism after the Extreme Left, 1976-1985 (AutPo). The study examines the European autonomist movements of the 1970s and 1980s from the lens of transnational urban history, focusing on the circulation of concepts and practices between cities in Italy, West Germany, Switzerland, and France. The project will recover the transnational dimensions and impacts of a period of youth radicalism often overshadowed by the events of 1968.

His book project Street Fighting Men: Protest, Violence, and Police in Western Europe, 1962-1982, is an interdisciplinary study of protest cultures and public order in France, West Germany, and Italy. The book argues that decades of student rebellion, worker insubordination and social movements led Western European governments to adapt new methods and practices in order to control protest militancy and mitigate public scrutiny of police behavior. His article “Beyond the Matraque: State Violence and Its Representation during the Parisian 1968 Events” in The Journal of Modern History received the Council for European Studies First Article Prize in 2021.