After completing his PhD at SOAS in 2000, Giacomo Macola spent two years at the University of Zambia thanks to a postdoctoral scholarship by the Leverhulme Trust. After being appointed Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies at the University of Cambridge (2004-2007), he moved to a permanent post at the University of Kent, where he held the positions of Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in African History. In 2019, he was appointed Associate Professor of African History at "La Sapienza" University of Rome. 

Giacomo Macola is a specialist in the political and military history of central Africa, with a particular focus on Zambia and the DR of Congo in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His most significant recent publications are the monographs The Gun in Central Africa – published in 2016 in the New African History series of Ohio University Press, Una storia violenta. Potere e conflitti nel bacino del Congo (XVIII-XXI secolo) (Rome: Viella, 2021), and the critical edition The Colonial Occupation of Katanga, published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy in 2018. His articles have appeared in several specialist journals, including the Journal of African History, Africa, the International Journal of African Historical Studies and History in Africa. 

Giacomo Macola has held visiting professorships at the University of the Free State (2016) and the University of Cagliari (2017). Between 2006 and 2016, he sat on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of African History. He is co-editor of "Warfare and Militarism in African History", a book series housed at Ohio University Press, and also a member of the executive editorial board of the journal Africa (Rome) and of the editorial committee of the British Academy’s Fontes Historiae Africanae.