Francesco entered Harvard’s Joint PhD Program in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2021. His doctoral research examines the formation of social classes and modern states in the Eastern Mediterranean over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. His dissertation aims to examine these phenomena through a comparative study of the merchant classes of two Ottoman provincial capitals: ‘Akka, a port city on the Syrian littoral, and Ioannina, the largest city in Epirus, an area of the southern Balkans which straddles modern Greece and Albania. The project is indicative of some of his broader interests in historical sociology, comparative history, the history of capitalism, and its relationship to the production of urban and rural space.