After studying at the University of Florence and gaining a PhD at the University of Naples “Federico II”, Roberto Zaugg has worked at the University of Basel, at Sciences Po (Paris) as well as at the University of Lausanne and at the University of Bern. In 2019, he joined the University of Zurich. In his PhD thesis, he has examined the condition of foreigners in eighteenth-century Naples. This has led him to engage with the history of judicial institutions, Mediterranean merchant diasporas, diplomatic relations, as well as the history of citizenship rights and migrations. In his post-doc years, he has extended the focus of his research to autobiographical writings, the slave trade, the cultural history of colonialism and – from a geographical point of view – to the German-speaking territories, the Atlantic world and West Africa. Thanks to the funding of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) he has published an edition of the the journal of barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1682-1696): a manuscript which relates the author’s extended journeyman migration through the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic as well as his two trans-Atlantic voyages aboard Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships. More recently, he has reoriented his scholarly interests from German-Atlantic to Italian-Atlantic entanglements in the early modern era. Thanks to a SNSF grant, he has built a research group and an international network which explore past connections linking the Mediterranean peninsula to the Americas and to sub-Saharan Africa.