Laura Popa (PhD)

Laura Popa holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Giessen in Germany, having achieved the highest distinction—summa cum laude—and passed with no corrections in 2025. Her dissertation, Nation-State Building at the Crossroads of Gender, Culture, and Religion: Protestant Women Schoolteachers in Italy, 1860–1915, investigated for the first time how and why a group of minority Protestant women tried to build the Italian nation through professional teaching and missionary activities. Her PhD was funded by the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst in Germany. Popa also received several scholarships and research grants, including a visiting scholarship from Sidney Sussex College—sponsored by Fellow Prof. Eugenio Biagini—at the University of Cambridge, research scholarships from the German Historical Institute in Rome and London, and research grants from the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst and the University of Giessen.

Since December 2023, she has been appointed as a Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide (CCCW) in the UK. Beginning in January 2026, she will conduct her postdoctoral research for two years at the Faculty of History in Cambridge as a British Academy International Fellowship award holder, under the supervision of Prof. David Maxwell. Her postdoctoral project examines a global history of Bible Women. It has already been supported by a Max Weber Scholarship, a RESILIENCE TNA Fellowship in Italy, and an Early Career Grant from the German Association for British Studies.

Popa has conducted research, taught, and published in the UK (University of Cambridge), Germany (University of Giessen), Italy (Universities of Turin and Perugia), and Romania (University of Iași) during her academic career. Her research interests focus on history, religion, and culture in the late modern period, ranging from women’s history, the history of feminism and feminist theory, to cultural theories of hybridity, nation, and religious minorities, as well as the cultural history of Protestant Christianity. More recently, in 2023, Popa organised the conference entitled Bible Revolution: Empowering People, Subverting Identities. New Study Directions in 21st-Century Academic Research at the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge. The event was funded by the Evangelisches Studienwerk and organised in collaboration with Prof. Eugenio Biagini (University of Cambridge) and the CCCW. Popa is also a collaborator of the research project, Protestantism as a Minority Religion, initiated by Prof. Biagini.  

Her recent publications include the edited volume Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity (2024), as well as the book chapters “Hybridity and Protestantism in the Twenty-First Century Global World” with the WVT (2024), and “He teaches me so I can teach”: Revivalism and Laywomen in Nineteenth-Century Italy with Palgrave Macmillan (2025).

A recent research interest of hers lies in finding conceptual and methodological connections between Cultural Studies, Protestantism, and World Christianity.