Valentina Dal Cin

Valentina Dal Cin is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and CESTA. She earned her Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of Verona in 2015 with her dissertation "Il mondo nuovo. L’élite veneta fra rivoluzione e restaurazione (1797-1815)" (The Venetian élite between Revolution and Restoration), which was published in 2019. She is currently involved in the project NapsApps: Napoleonic Job Applications. From Personal Pleas to Modern Curriculum Vitae in Early 19th-Century Europe. It combines social, cultural, and administrative history to study the transition from pre-1789 job applications’ rhetoric, which conceived employment as grace, to modern rhetoric, based on knowledge and skills, by analyzing a corpus of Italian and French archival sources through a qualitative and quantitative approach.

Project Description: The project I am working on focuses on applications for employment in the Napoleonic departmental administration. Crossing a prosopographical approach with textual analysis, I am studying a group of applicants based on their different characteristics (age, background, social class, place of origin, etc.) to understand how they interacted with the government, particularly through the use of different rhetorical strategies to get hired. The underlying question is that of the willingness of elites (French or foreign, old and new) to collaborate with the Napoleonic imperial government and their understanding of its policies and new administrative practices. For my CESTA fellowship project, I will focus on this quantitative analysis that cross-references the characteristics of the candidates with those of their texts, to identify different behaviors but also common strategies, while for the overall project I will also delve into case studies with a qualitative approach.