Dr Enrico Dal Lago (History) has been awarded the DLitt (Doctor of Literature) degree on Published Work by the National University of Ireland – a higher doctorate awarded to scholars who have published a substantial body of ground-breaking and influential work in a research field and who have achieved outstanding distinction internationally. Dal Lago joined the History Department at NUI Galway in 1999, where he is currently Lecturer in American History. Over the past fifteen years, he has published four monographs: Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861 (2005); American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective (2012); William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (2013); and The Age of Lincoln and Cavour: Comparative Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century American and Italian Nation-Building (2015). Dal Lago’s research focuses on the comparative history of the nineteenth-century Americas and Europe, and particularly the United States in the era of the American Civil War and Italy in the age of Italian national unification. He utilizes this particular angle to investigate the rise and fall of conservative elite ideologies and exploitative forms of labour, the spread of ideas of reform and progress, and the making and unmaking of nations in the midst of civil conflicts in the course of the nineteenth century. Since he joined NUI Galway, Dal Lago has supervised several PhD students on research projects that have developed from his own comparative and transnational interests. Two of his former students – Cathal Smith and Joe Regan – are currently organizing a major international conference on the nineteenth-century Euro-American agrarian world, which will take place in June 2016 in the Moore Institute.