Dear members of ASMI and readers of Modern Italy,

We would like to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves as the newly appointed General Editors of Modern Italy. We took up office on 1 April 2022, succeeding Francesca Billiani and Andrea Mammone. Our aim is to build upon their excellent work and that of their predecessors and ensure that Modern Italy maintains its outstanding international profile.

We firmly believe in the importance of Modern Italy, a journal operating at the cutting edge of the various disciplines contributing to Italian studies. We commit ourselves to improve it, and to expand its readership and its importance within Italian Studies, in the UK and abroad. We would like to see a wide range of articles published in Modern Italy, and we intend to achieve this by stretching the boundaries of what is regarded as modern Italian history and culture. In this respect, for example, we will welcome papers on eighteenth-century Italian history and culture. We are committed to enlarging the pool of contributors to the journal by actively seeking submissions, subject to rigorous peer review, from those who are proposing new approaches within their disciplines, applying new methodologies, and researching what has hitherto received little scholarly attention. In order to maintain and enhance standards, we can count on a well-established, but continuously growing, pool of authoritative peer-reviewers whose work for the journal is invaluable.

Nick Carter, Vinzia Fiorino and Rossella Merlino have graciously accepted to help us in our endeavours, and they have been appointed as Associate Editors. We would like to thank their immediate predecessors Mila Milani and Francesco Cassata for their contribution. We will also be able to count on the help of our Review Editors: Roberta Colbertaldo, Giovanna Summerfield, Nicolas Virtue, and the newly appointed Amy King. One of our first acts as newly appointed editors was to write to the members of our editorial and advisory committees, to seek their advice. They responded positively. It is of great comfort to us to know that we can count on the support of so many esteemed colleagues. The staff at Cambridge University Press have helped us a great deal in understanding the ScholarOne submission system. Their experience is proving invaluable to us daily.

We all know that these are difficult times for the departments of Humanities/Modern Languages in the United Kingdom, and for the subject of Italian in particular. Several degree courses in Italian have been discontinued over the last decade, and the number of PhD students and teaching positions in Italian Studies has diminished. It has therefore never been as important as it is today to promote the study of Italian history, culture and society, to assert the global relevance of Italian Studies, and demonstrate its inter- and transdisciplinary potential.

Modern Italy will do its part by publishing and reviewing leading research in modern Italian history, politics, sociology, anthropology, arts and literature by offering young as well as established scholars an outlet and by promoting debates on current issues. We will do all this in collaboration with the officers and members of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, the association that founded Modern Italy in 1995, and to which our journal is indissolubly linked. We are firmly committed to our objectives. However, we will need the help of each and every one of you to achieve them.

Therefore, we ask you to invite your academic acquaintances, your PhD students as well as colleagues, to submit their research to Modern Italy, either in English or Italian. We also hope that you would consider submitting to Modern Italy your own research, as well as proposals for special issues.

In these troubled times, our thoughts cannot help but turn to what is happening in Ukraine. We all have watched in horror the devastation this conflict has produced over the last few months. Save the Children UK has launched an emergency appeal, alongside the Disasters Emergency Committee, to help the Ukrainian children and their families who have been forced to flee their homes; we are pleased to have used the journal funds to contribute a small donation.

We said earlier that we wish to host debate on current issues in Modern Italy; in this spirit, we have also asked Professor Giulia Lami to write a piece about news coverage of the Ukrainian crisis by the Italian press. This features as the opening piece of this issue.

Many thanks for your attention and support.

The General Editors