Professor Cocco teaches the history of Italy, early modern Europe, and the Mediterranean.  He has written on humanism and seventeenth-century science, on volcanoes and volcanology, on natural history, disasters, and urban history.  His first book, Watching Vesuvius (University of Chicago), was published in 2012.  His most recent paper, titled “Baroque Tectonics:  Eruptions and Disruptions of the Vesuvian City,” will be published by the Open Arts Journal in 2017.