Independent Scholar and Translator
Toronto
Two translations: Flavio Biondo's Roma Instaurata and Gianni Vattimo's Dialogo con Nietzsche
2004-2005
William McCuaig is an independent scholar and translator living in Toronto. He holds two graduate degrees in Renaissance Studies from the Warburg Institute, University of London: M. Phil, for a dissertation on Bernardo Rucellai of Florence (1448-1514), a political actor and historian; and Ph. D., for a thesis on Carlo Sigonio (c. 1522-1584), an ancient and medieval historian. During the period 1985-1987 William held a posto di perfezionamento at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, where he studied European history. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, he taught early modern European history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto in Mississauga. Carlo Sigonio. The changing world of the late Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) is his major independent publication. His translations include works by Federico Chabod, Carlo Rosselli, and Piero Gobetti. At the Italian Academy, he will prepare translations of a Latin work by the fifteenth-century humanist Flavio Biondo (for I Tatti Renaissance Library) and the collected articles of the philosopher Gianni Vattimo on Friedrich Nietzsche (for Columbia University Press).
Heinrich Heine Universität Dusseldorf
Topology of social memory. Tomb Chapels of the Neapolitan nobility in early modern times
2004-2005
Tanja Michalsky, Ph.D. (University of Munich 1995) recently finished a study on "Projection and imagination. Conceptions of Netherlandish landscape in the dialogue between geography and painting" (supported by a scholarship from the Lise-Meitner-Programm). She has been Research Fellow in the Faculty of Art History at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main (1995-2000). Her main research interests are the relationship between (political and artistic) representation and the social network of memory, Italian late-medieval sculpture, Netherlandish painting (16th and 17th century) and the process of collective imagination in different visual media. Tanja is author of Memoria und Repräsentation. Die Grabmäler des Königshauses Anjou in Italien (2000) and the editor of Medien der Macht. Kunst zur Zeit der Anjous in Italien (2001). Most of her articles in the field of tomb sculpture deal with methodological questions concerning form, function and competition. Her papers on Netherlandish landscape painting focus on the ideological and epistemological background of its modes of visualization. She has also published articles on film and contemporary art.
2004-2005: Film & Video
Rä di Martino was born in Rome in 1975 and has been living and working in London since 1997 where she graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Art.
In October 2003 she opened her first solo exhibition at Monitor Gallery in Rome. Rä has also participated and exhibited works at various group exhibitions in Bologna, Prague, Chicago, London, Berlin, and Barcelona. Her 2002 film 'NOT360' was winner of the 2nd video art award of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Trento and Galleria Civica di Rovereto, and her 2001 film 'between' was shortlisted and exhibited at the 2002 Beck's Student Film Award at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in London.
Universita' di Milano
Mnemosyne and Mythical Time Nowadays
2004-2005
After studies at the Universities of Bologna and Padua (Italy), Mauro Carbone received his PhD in 1990 at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, with a dissertation awarded by the Royal Academy of Belgium. A revised and enlarged edition of this work is available in French under the title La visibilité de l'invisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Cézanne et Proust [The Visibility of the Invisible: Merleau-Ponty between Cézanne and Proust] (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001). An English collection of his essays, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy, was published in the Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series of Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL: 2004). Mauro Carbone is also the founder and a member of the Board of Directors of the journal Chiasmi International. Trilingual Studies concerning Merleau-Ponty's Thought (http://filosofia.dipafilo.unimi.it/~chiasmi/). At the Italian Academy Carbone's work will aim at verifying the relevance of Proust's concept of reminiscence in our epoch, as well as at verifying whether the most recent developments of arts could still be interpreted according to that direction, or rather open different ways of philosophically thinking reminiscence, recognition and memory themselves.
Universita' di Cassino
A Structural Health Monitoring Approach to Detect Damage in Historical Constructions
2004-2005
Maura Imbimbo is Associate Professor of Structural Analysis and Design at the University of Cassino. She received a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II. From 1996 to 2003 she received fellowships and grants from the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research and from the Italian National Research Council (C.N.R.). During 2002 and 2003 she was visiting scholar at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics of Columbia University. She is local responsible of the research project "R.C. structural elements strengthened in shear by FRP: theoretical and experimental modelling and structural health monitoring ", supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research. She was member of the Scientific Committee for doctoral theses and the Tribunal for doctoral theses at the Departamento de Ingeniería de la Construcción, Unversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2002-2003). She is author of more than 40 papers published on international technical journals and conference proceedings. Her main research studies are base isolation (modelling of the non linear behaviour of elastomeric bearings for base isolation, mixed f.e.m. for rubber-like material), composite materials (shear and flexural strengthening of reinforced concrete structural elements with composite sheets, strengthening of masonry arches with composite sheets), masonry structures (stabilization and stability of leaning towers, analyses of the safety conditions of the Colosseum in Rome), system identification (damage identification, reduced order models).
Universita' di Catanzaro
Cellular and Molecular Mechanism Underlying the Persistance of Long-Term Memory
2004-2005
Maria Concetta Miniaci is Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University "Magna Græcia" of Catanzaro and currently a visiting scientist in the laboratory of Eric Kandel at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University. She received her M.D. (cum laude) from the University of Reggio Calabria, Catanzaro. Her main research interests lie in the areas of synaptic plasticity and the mechanisms underlying learning and memory storage. She began her studies by investigating the role of the hippocampus in associative learning in collaboration with Pietro Scotto, University of Catanzaro, and Bruno De Luca, University of Naples. As a Fondazione Bonino Pulejo fellow with Jan Bures at the Academy of Science in Prague, she focused her research on place navigation and the cognitive map of rats guided by vestibular and kinesthetic orienting cues. She next turned her attention to an electrophysiological analysis of synaptic plasticity in the cerebellum as a CNR postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Piergiorgio Strata in Turin. As a fellow of the Italian Academy she will focus on the cellular and molecular events that underlie both the initiation and stabilization of the synaptic changes associated with long-term memory.
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Toronto; Universita' di Roma 'La Sapienza'
Neo-Gregorian Chant for the Mass in Southern Italy: A Bridge between Old and New Style
2004-2005
Luisa Nardini earned her PhD in Musicology at the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" with a dissertation on the neo-Gregorian chant found in manuscripts from southern Italy (11th-13th centuries). She has received scholarships to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Prof. A.E. Planchart. She was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Santa Barbara, California (2002-2003), where she taught Music History and Notation. In 2003-2004 she was an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where she is currently finishing her postdoctoral Licence in Medieval Studies. She has published articles and delivered conference presentations on Gregorian chant, medieval musical theory, music iconography, early polyphony, and Hildegard von Bingen. She has performance experience as a pianist and choir singer and director. Her project at the Italian Academy will be the preparation of a book containing the edition and study of the neo-Gregorian chants for the Mass in southern Italy from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her previous research on the subject has shed light on some of the most controversial problems regarding the earliest history of Western music and the interrelationships between Roman, Gallican, and Italian chants, as well as on issues of oral and written transmission in the medieval musical culture.
University of New South Wales
Australia
The Accademia degli Inquieti: an Analysis of Experimental Philosophy in Bologna from 1690 to 1714
2004-2005
Luciano Boschiero graduated with first-class Honours in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Wollongong in 1999. He recently completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales. The title of his doctoral dissertation is: Natural philosophy inside the mid to late seventeenth-century Tuscan court: the history of the Accademia del Cimento. Luciano has had several chapters of his thesis published with international journals specializing in the history and philosophy of science. In 2002 he was the winner of the Annals of Science Prize for the paper: "Natural philosophical contention inside the Accademia del Cimento: the properties and effects of heat and cold." In his post-doctoral appointment at the Italian Academy, Luciano will be researching the rise of experimental philosophy in late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century Italian institutions, with particular focus on the activities of the Accademia degli Inquieti in Bologna. He is interested in the way the Inquieti used experimental philosophy as a persuasive presentational device in order to strengthen its authority in natural philosophical fields and appeal to potential members and patrons.
Yale University
Fortunato Depero's Multidimensional Spatial Inventions in New York
2004-2005
Laura Chiesa received her Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Pisa and a D.E.A. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In October she will receive her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She is currently a lector in the Italian Department at Yale University. She translated Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler's Ecografie della televisione into Italian. Her article on Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, "Multiple e contrastanti emozioni tra città e puzzle," is forthcoming in the Romanic Review (Fall 2004). At the Italian Academy she will research Fortunato Depero's spatial inventions during his stay in New York (between 1927 and 1930), focusing on the theatrical, architectural and visual dimensions of his work, and situating it within the context of other works of the same period.
Freie Universität Berlin
Signa and Res-Pictoral Allegories in the Italian Renaissance (14th-16th century)
2004-2005
Klaus Krueger, Ph.D. (University of Munich 1987) is currently Professor of Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has been Research Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and Professor at the Universities of Greifswald and Basel. His main research interests are the history and cultural status of visual images, particularly their changing role in medieval and early modern times, with special reference to Italian painting and sculpture from the Duecento to the Seicento. He is author of Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien: Gestalt- und Funktionswandel des Tafelbildes im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert [The early cult of the image of St Francis in Italy: Formal and functional change in 13th and 14th century panel painting] (1992) and Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien (2001) [to be published in English translation by Zone Books as Unveiling the Invisible. Image and Aesthetic Illusion in Early Modern Italy]. Klaus has also published articles on the origin and early history of the altarpiece, on visionary images, on Caravaggio, and on aesthetic issues of film and contemporary art.
University of California
Santa Barbara; Universita' degli Studi
The Influence of Italian Music on the Emergence of a Modern Audience in France in the Eighteenth Century
2004-2005
Guido Olivieri has published articles and reviews on Baroque instrumental music and on the music of Gaetano Donizetti and Luciano Berio in scholarly journals. He also contributed to the new editions of the two major dictionaries in the field: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. His research traces the influence of social and political contexts on the circulation of music and musicians in eighteenth-century Europe. Using new sources, he has investigated the history of musical institutions in Naples, aspects of the aesthetics of reception and musical patronage, shedding light on the activity of several musicians and rediscovering unedited compositions. His research at the Italian Academy will focus on the reception of Italian music in France and the emergence of a modern audience at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Universita' di Trento
Mental Representations of Strategic Interaction
2004-2005
Giovanna Devetag received a B.A. in Business Economics from Ca' Foscari University of Venice (1996), a Ph.D. in Economics from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa (2000), and a Post-doc Research Fellowship from the University of Trento (2000-2002). She is currently Ricercatrice in Business Economics and Management at the University of Trento. She has been a visiting student at UC Berkeley (1995) and visiting research fellow at Princeton University (1997). Her main research interests include experimental economics, behavioral game theory, and agent-based modelling. She has published articles in international journals including Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology, Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, Industrial and Corporate Change, Physica A. At the Italian Academy, Giovanna will work on the impact of visual and diagrammatic reasoning in the mental representation of strategic interaction.
2004-2005: Painting, Drawing & Video
Gabriele Picco, a visual artist, received a degree in Italian Literature-Art History from Università Statale of Milan in 2000. In 1997 he was selected by the Viafarini space in Milan for a workshop with Jimmy Durham and by Fondazione Ratti in Como with Allan Kaprow. Gabriele has worked with different media: video (his short movies were selected by Univideo, Pescara in 1998, and Cortopotere, Bergamo in 2004), installations, painting and writing. His paintings have been in solo and group shows in Italy and elsewhere, in contemporary art galleries and public art spaces. In 2000 he won the Michetti Prize which was focused on the new wave of painting in Europe. In 2001 he was the only Italian painter selected at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo for Premio Guarene, focused on young international painting. He is also author of a novel, Aureole in cerca di santi, which was published in 2002 by Ponte alle Grazie. At the Italian Academy Gabriele will work on a new project related to the city of New York, called “100 Heavens” making use of both video and painting.
Universita' di Milano
The Figure in the Portrait. An Interdisciplinary Recognition 1850-1915.
2004-2005
Francesca Frigerio graduated summa cum laude in Foreign Languages and Literatures (English and French) at the University of Milan, with a thesis entitled "Modernism and urban culture: London in Dorothy Richardson's novels". In 2004 she has received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Milan, with a dissertation centered on the role of music - both as a theme and as an aesthetic model - in Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West's novels. While going on investigating the relationship between urban culture and women's writing (she is currently member of the editorial board of the "Literary London Journal"), she is now working on a project focused on the cultural history of the portrait, as it unfolds in England in the second half of the Nineteenth century. She has most recently published both on Rebecca West ("Under West(ern) Eyes: Rebecca West Reads Joyce", Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. XXVI, No.1, Fall 2002; "Music and the Feminine Aesthetics of Detail in Rebecca West's Harriet Hume", in Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches, edited by Bernard Schweizer, Palgrave, forthcoming) and on Dorothy Richardson (Musical Aesthetics and Narrative Forms in Dorothy Richardson's prose, Textus, Textus, XVI, No.1, 2003; "'A Filmless London': Flânerie and Urban Culture in Dorothy Richardson's Articles for Close Up", in The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London. Selected Essays from the 2002 Literary London Conference: Representations of London in Literature, (Rodopi Press, November 2004).
Northwestern University
Chicago; Universita' di Pisa
Aby Warburg: A Philosphy of the Future
2004-2005
Davide Stimilli is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Pisa and in comparative literature from Yale University. He is the author of Fisionomia di Kafka (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001) and The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (Albany: SUNY Press, November 2004). He is the editor of a monographic issue of the Italian journal aut aut devoted to Aby Warburg (Aby Warburg. La dialettica dell'immagine, 321-322/2004), and of a forthcoming selection of Warburg's unpublished writings under the title Per monstra ad sphaeram: Selected Writings 1923-1925 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2005). At the Italian Academy he will be completing a book-length study of Warburg's work, which carries the provisional title Aby Warburg: A Philology of the Future and is meant to articulate the dialectic of philology and divination that is at the core of Warburg's methodology.
Universita' di Palermo
Black Italia: Narrations and Representations of Blacks in Contemporary Italy
2004-2005
Alessandra Di Maio is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Palermo, Italy. She received her Italian doctorate in Comparative Studies and Literary Sciences from the Universities of Bari and Pavia in 1995. She further specialized in the United States, where she first was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and where she taught at different institutions as Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. Her area of specialization includes migratory, postcolonial, diasporan and black studies, with a particular attention to how issues of ethnicity, gender, representation, narration, memory and forgetting interact in the formation of national and transnational identities. Among her publications are the volumes Tutuola at The University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000); and the translation and introduction to Nuruddin Farah's Rifugiati (Rome: Meltemi, 2003; original title Yesterday, Tomorrow), which was awarded the Sandro Onofri Prize. Her research at the Italian Academy focuses on the narration and representation of people of African descent in contemporary artistic productions from and about Italy.