Giuliana Chamedes is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University specializing in modern European history. During her current tenure at Harvard University, she is affiliated with the Center for European Studies and teaching through Harvard's History and Literature Program. 

Giuliana's dissertation argues that the Vatican became an important, if understudied, vehicle for social and political change in several Western European countries in the years between 1917 and 1949. The process was advanced through grassroots mobilization, top-down diplomacy, and the drafting of new ideological weapons in the perceived battle against secularization.

Making use of new archival sources, the dissertation explores the bold response of the twentieth-century papacy to its nineteenth-century loss of territorial and political sovereignty. It focuses on the period following the Great War, when Pope Pius XI, who ruled from 1922 to 1939, concluded nearly a dozen concordats, or treaties between the Holy See and secular states. Concordats enshrined canon law as state law, and greatly increased the legal protections for Catholic activity in domains like education and the media. Pius XI also expanded the mass politics of the papacy by centralizing Catholic Action, the largest Catholic lay organization in Europe, and encouraging its expansion in fields like journalism and the arts.

By the early 1930s, concordat diplomacy and Catholic Action had brought the papacy newfound prominence.  At this point, the Vatican turned its attention to what was soon deemed the greatest existential threat to the full reconquest of Europe, the Soviet Union. What followed was an ambitious Vatican anti-communist campaign, which had the effect of increasing the institution's visibility and spreading a Catholic anti-communist ideology worldwide. In the course of Pius XI's anti-communist campaign, Catholic thinkers developed a new rights-based approach to church-state relations so as to criticize what was deemed the excessive power of the state to intervene in personal (and religious) matters. This approach which would ultimately undermine the central tenets of concordat diplomacy. According to this new line of thinking, the role of the Vatican was no longer to partner with and buttress the power of individual nation-states, but rather to act as a check on excessive state power by encouraging the protection of "human rights" by transnational institutions, including the Vatican itself.

In 1939, Pope Pius XI was succeeded by Pope Pius XII, who took definite steps away from his predecessor's concordat model, choosing instead to foreground the emergent rights-based approach. This approach enabled the Vatican to retain its legal protections in individual European states, while simultaneously clearing its questionable record of allying with authoritarian regimes before and during the Second World War. In the mid 1940s, Pope Pius XII launched a second Catholic anti-communist campaign, which took a strong position against the Soviet Union, this time in the name of "human rights." The dissertation argues that this campaign played an important role in casting the emergent Cold War as a religious conflict and in empowering Christian Democratic parties, which rose to prominence across Western Europe in the years following 1945.