His study of associational life in nineteenth-century Italy, Building a Civil Society, was published last fall by the University of Toronto Press. It won the American Association of Italian Studies 2014 prize for the best book on 18th- or 19th-century Italy, and the Society for Italian Historical Studies 2014 Marraro prize for the best book on the history of Italy. He is currently working on a second book project, concerning political prisoners in southern Italy on the eve of Italian unification.