Francesca Lidia Viano is a historian of Euro-American relations and exchanges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She received her first PhD from the University of Perugia, Italy, and a second one from King’s College, University of Cambridge. She is interested in bringing to light the grid of transnational exchanges that generated some of the most iconic among American institutions and symbols. She has published extensively on the reciprocal representations of Europe and the United States through authors such as the Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen and the British politician James Bryce. Her recent Sentinel: The Unlikely History of the Statue of Liberty(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) follows the ideological and material construction of the Statue of Liberty from France to Egypt and America, from the East to the West, to challenge established theories of cultural communication and appropriation. She is currently writing on shifting theories of conscience and on the origins of the United States in light of the Federalist Party’s engagement with the world.