Anna Cento Bull

Anna Cento Bull is a British academic specialising in post-World War II Italian history. She is emeritus Professor of Italian History and Politics at the University of Bath, where she has taught since 1996. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Naples and a doctorate from the University of Reading. Bull concludes that "it is only at the level of violent conflict that Italy may be deemed to have achieved a long- lasting peace. By any other criteria – tolerance, nonvictimisation, rehumanising and nondemonising the adversary, self-transformation and a more balanced self-identity – national reconciliation remains a distant target." The book was positively reviewed in Terrorism and Political Violence and Modern Italy. The latter review observed that Bull "makes an implicit argument about the hierarchies of historiography. She treats the long judicial casebooks produced in Italy as authoritative documents while characterising the statements and testimony of the right as symptomatic and tendentious rather than as sources of oral history."

In the second part, Bull again examines memories of the violence, from the perspectives of perpetrators and victims or their families. She observes that the latter focus more on the role of the state, which remains unclear, writing: "Even if not proven, there are sufficient grounds for arguing that the behaviour of the Italian State in fighting armed terrorism has been relatively opaque and twisted, enough to require it to embark on some form of reparation and reconciliation." The book was positively reviewed in H-Net: "the primary contribution of Ending Terrorism in Italy lies in its original and comprehensive account of the various processes, factors, and practices contributing to the ending of terrorism in Italy and its incisive evaluation of the legacy of the same."

Selected publications From Peasant to Entrepreneur: The Survival of the Family Economy in Italy, with P. Corner (1993). . Entrepreneurial Textile Communities, with M. Pitt and J. Szarka (1993). Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy (2000). The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics, with M. Gilbert (2001). Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation (2007). Ending Terrorism in Italy, with P. Cooke (2013). Modern Italy: A Very Short Introduction (2017).