Hunter College mourns the death of our colleague Professor of History Emerita Marta Petrusewicz. She died in Rende, Italy, on February 4, 2026, two months before her 78th birthday.
An internationally renowned social and economic historian, Petrusewicz studied the agricultural periphery of 19th century Europe, in particular, southern Italy. She also was known for her role as a political dissident in the student uprisings that shook Poland and Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s.
“Marta was an intellectual powerhouse, a distinguished scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a warm and supportive colleague,” said Hunter History Department Chair Donna Haverty-Stacke. “We are all deeply saddened by her death and her colleagues will miss her very much.”
Petrusewicz’s most important work, Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery, won Italy’s prestigious Sila literary prize when her book first came out in Italian. When it was published in English, the reviewer in International Labor and Working-Class History called it “one of the pioneering works of a new body of Italian scholarship that has dramatically revised our view of the history of Italy’s ‘southern question.’”
Expanding on her original research, Petrusewicz went on to compare the process of modernization during the 19th century in Ireland, Norway, Poland, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. She published many articles on the subject and helped organize a major international conference of scholars who focused on the periphery worldwide. When she died, Petrusewicz was working on her much-anticipated book on the European periphery.
Before coming to Hunter in 1991, Petrusewicz taught at Princeton and had affiliations with the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at Binghamton University and with Harvard’s Center of European Studies. She retired from Hunter in 2011 to accept a named chair at the University of Calabria, located in the town of Rende.
In every institution at which Petrusewicz taught, she had a strong following of students, some of whom remained close friends and colleagues until her death. One former student, Marla Stone, now Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Occidental College, remembers how Petrusewicz “had a huge and defining impact on [her] intellectually, politically, and personally.” Other students at Hunter said the same. Students and colleagues deeply appreciated Petrusewicz’s intelligence, enthusiasm, and fierce commitment to her students and colleagues.
In Italy, Petrusewicz made a huge impact on those with whom she worked, both at the University of Calabria and in the town of Rende. When she retired from teaching, the town’s mayor appointed her its assessora alla cultura and then, in a political emergency, deputy mayor. Colleagues and civic leaders remembered her for her brilliance, empathy, and influence on cultural institutions, perhaps most significantly on creating the Museo del Presente. Petrusewicz also helped modernize local libraries and strengthen cultural ties between the university and the townspeople of Rende
“Her light will continue to guide us,” said former Mayor Marcello Manna in a tribute.
A political activist since her student days in Poland, Petrusewicz courageously defended democratic values, social justice, and human rights in the face of authoritarianism. In Italy she continued doing so with her lifetime partner, Franco Piperno. An acclaimed theoretical physicist and controversial figure in radical Italian politics, Piperno died last year.
Marta Petrusewicz was born in Warsaw in 1948 to parents of Jewish origin who had spent the war in the USSR and returned to Poland with the Soviet army, having served the liberation campaign as medical doctors. Raised in a dynamic intellectual community, Petrusewicz joined an outspoken group of dissidents at the university, who were opposed to Soviet totalitarian rule.
On January 30, 1968, Petrusewicz took part in an historic student demonstration against the Polish government’s decision, on orders from the USSR, to shut down the National Theatre’s production of Forefathers’ Eve (Dziady), the famous play by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s revered 19th century poet. The demonstration was crushed immediately and Petrusewicz was arrested, but she was not imprisoned for long. More protests followed. Petrusewicz was expelled from the university and left Poland shortly thereafter for Italy, where she continued her university studies at the University of Bologna and joined the Italian student movement.
Soon after receiving her PhD, Petrusewicz moved with Piperno to Canada, then alone to the United States, because the U.S. Government refused to give her partner a visa. Piperno eventually went back to Italy while Petrusewicz launched her academic career in the States.
Even though Petrusewicz left home in 1968, she never lost touch with the dissident movement in Poland. When the government declared martial law in1981, she joined her fellow exiled Polish compatriots in supporting Solidarity. After communism fell in 1989, Petrusewicz regularly visited Poland to see her mother and sister; the intellectual community welcomed her back warmly. When she returned to Italy in 2011, she also established strong ties with the Polish Embassy in Rome.
The embassy had invited Petrusewicz to speak as part of its celebration of Polish Science Day on February 20 of this year. In a statement mourning Petrusewicz’s death, the embassy wrote, “One of the highlights of the program was to be her lecture: ‘What is Comparative History? What is It for?’”
The statement called her “an outstanding scholar, an historian of international renown and authority, and an exceptionally important figure for the academic, intellectual, and cultural world.”
Many of Petrusewicz’s close colleagues at Hunter have retired and, in some cases, died, yet her memory lives on.
Professor of Anthropology Emerita Judith Friedlander remembers Petrusewicz arriving at the college in January 1991, when she herself had just arrived as the new dean of social sciences:
“I will never forget the first time I met Marta,” Friedlander said. “She came to my office to introduce herself. Although I can’t remember the dress she was wearing, her stockings were something else — a multicolored netted weave that did not exactly match the image of a professional women who wanted to make a serious impression. Not to mention the long dangling earrings! But that was Marta: charming, worldly, and totally unpredictable in the way she dressed, thought, and lived her life. I was enchanted and remained so for the next 35 years.”
