Professor Cocco has traditionally taught 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 current research and teaching focuses on the ecological humanities (or environmental humanities), and is most interested writing about the borderlands where human and non-human histories overlap in networks of relation.  This growth stems from his collaboration with professors Kathleen Kete and Tom Wickman on two courses: HIST 219 Planet Earth and HIST 220 Possible Earths.  The book he is writing,  called The Octopus and the Others, explores the presence of sea animals in the eighteenth-century metropolis of Naples.