MARINA NICOLI

I teach Economic History at undergraduate level and Business History at graduate level.

I am happy to supervise students interested in exploring themes at the intersection of economic and social history. In the past years I supervised dissertations about: the effects of de-industrialization; the historical development of shareholder value; sustainable enterprises; the history of consumption after 1945; state intervention in the film industry; European film co-productions.

I am a Tenured Lecturer in Economic History.
I hold a degree in Economics and Management (Bocconi University, 2003) and a Ph.D. in Economic History (Bocconi University, 2009). 

Before joining the Department of Social and Political Sciences, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Bocconi University (2011–2016). 

In 2011, I was invited as a Visiting Fellow at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA), where I carried out the research that later resulted in my book The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry (Routledge, 2016). 

From 2017 to 2019, I worked as a Research Fellow on the international project Producers and Production Practices in the History of Italian Cinema, 1949–1975, directed by Professor Stephen Gundle at the University of Warwick.

I have collaborated with leading scholars, including Professor Peter Miskell (Henley Business School) and Professor John Sedgwick (Oxford Brookes University), in the field of the economic history of creative industries.

I am currently engaged in two research projects. The first, in collaboration with my colleague Valeria Giacomin (Assistant Professor, Bocconi University), investigates the history of intellectual property rights in the American toy industry in the post–World War II era. Drawing on legal sources from U.S. archives, we are tracing how leading firms in the sector built competitive advantage through non-market strategies.

The second project, conducted jointly with Federico Di Chio (Mediaset), examines film finance in Italy after 1945. Adopting a quantitative approach and drawing on newly uncovered archival sources, this study seeks to assess the extent and forms of American involvement in Italian film production.