[1] She was a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and is currently a professor in the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence.
[2] Riall studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge.
She was a lecturer in Modern European history at the University of Essex before moving to Birkbeck.
[3] Among her awards are a visiting professorship at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and a senior fellowship at the University of Freiburg's Institute of Advanced Study.
Several of her books treat the history of the Risorgimento; Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007) examined the popular cult of Giuseppe Garibaldi as a global cultural phenomenon.