The project Disasters, Communication and Politics in Southwestern Europe: the Making of Emergency Response Policies in the Early Modern Age (DisComPoSE) investigates the connections between the circulation of news about natural disasters, the processing of information about such events and the development of emergency management policies.

DisComPoSE examines the European and extra-European territories of the Hispanic Monarchy between the 16th and 18th centuries, and intends to understand how specific interpretations of environmental disasters influenced the evolution of cultural frameworks, of social relations and of power structures in ancien régime societies.

The five-year project is financed by the European Research Council (ERC) and is hosted by the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II. It involves scholars from different fields: from social and cultural history to the history of institutions, from textual criticism to the history of language and images, from anthropology to the history of science.

News and Events

The DisComPoSE project is coming to an end. The team is organizing the international conference Davanti alla fine. Culture e Politiche della calamità in età moderna (Before the end. Cultures and Policies of calamity in the early modern age). They will present the results of an interdisciplinary research lasting six years which has investigated the […]

In times of emergency, communication plays a crucial yet problematic role. While this may seem obvious nowadays, even before the emergence of modern media, the methods of gathering, elaborating and transmitting information had a significant influence on the perception of risk and on decision-making processes. The recently published book Communication and Politics in the Hispanic […]

Since 2022, you have been able to visit the virtual exhibition Paper eruptions. Four centuries of printing on volcanoes. The printed catalogue of the exhibition edited by Elisabetta Scirocco, Philine Helas, Golo Maurer, Domenico Cecere, Hanna Sophie Stegemann and Milena Viceconte is now also available. This publication is the result of a close collaboration between […]

Discover DisComPoSE

– Discover DisComPoSE –
Digital Archive

The Digital Archive provides access to detailed cards of printed documents, manuscripts, and images related to natural disasters in the Spanish Crown territory from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, collected by our research group. In each card, users can view the set of collected metadata, such as place of origin, production date, conservation institution, and where available, the transcription of handwritten and/or printed text. To learn more, click here.

– Routes–

Explore now Routes, the new interactive platform by DisComPoSE, through which you can visualize, quickly and intuitively, via a virtual map, the spatial reconstruction of documentation, tracking the movements of documents within the territories of the Spanish Crown from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. To learn more, click here.

This project has received funding from the European Research (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement N°759829

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