Università Ca' Foscari - Venice
The Venetian scala di Spalato as seen from Ottoman documents
2010-2011: Spring
PhD in Ottoman History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Vera Costantini is ricercatrice of Turkish Language and Literature since 2003. She lectures in Turkish Language, Ottoman History and Paleography both at Ca' Foscari and at the University of Palermo. Her main interests of research concern Early Modern economic history of the Mediterranean.
Institut Jean Nicod (ENS-CNRS-EHESS) - Paris
Vision to reason: visual routines for manipulating diagrams
2010-2011: Fall
Valeria Giardino obtained her Doctorate in 2006 at the University of Rome "La Sapienza." In her thesis, she discussed the use of figures and diagrams in mathematics. In 2007, she was an Associate Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institut Jean Nicod. From 2008 to 2010, her research at the Institut Nicod on Diagram-based Reasoning was supported by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program under a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development. Her current research aims at developing a theory about the way and the reasons that led humans to increase the powers of their mind by relying on external cognitive tools. She has published a book in Italian, together with Prof. Piazza, Senza Parole. Ragionare con le Immagini (Without Words. Reasoning with Images; Milano: Bompiani), and several articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Università di Perugia
Italian sculptors and the French court under Charles VIII and Louis XII
2010-2011: Spring
Università di Bologna
Byzantium, Italy and the Western Mediterranean in the seventh century: social transformations and cultural identities
2010-2011: Spring
Salvatore Cosentino is Professor of Byzantine Civilization at the University of Bologna. He began his research activity in the field of the Venetokratia by studying the social and economic system of the feudum in Venetian Crete (Aspetti e problemi del feudo veneto-cretese, Bologna 1987). He has studied the social history of late antique and early Byzantine Italy on which he wrote extensively (Prosopografia dell'Italia bizantina, 3 vols. Bologna 1996-2010; Storia arte e archeologia della Sardegna bizantina, Cagliari 2002; Storia dell'Italia bizantina, Bologna 2008). He interested also in the history of Byzantine navy and Byzantine military literature. Presently, he is working on social and economic aspects of the seventh century.
Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris
Pictorial representations of shadows: visual cognition and art history
2010-2011: Fall
Roberto Casati is a tenured senior researcher with the French CNRS at the Ecole Normale SupÉrieure in Paris. He has taught at several universities in Europe and US. He is the co-author of Holes (with Achille Varzi; MIT Press) and the author of The Discovery of the Shadow (Knopf), translated in 8 languages. He is working, with psychologist Vittorio Girotto, on a book on Creative Solutions, and is one of the participants in the Liquid Publications project. At the Italian Academy he will work on a book on the cognitive aspects of the artistic representations of shadows.
2010-2011
Pietro Ruffo was born in 1978 in Rome and later studied architecture there.
His paintings, drawings and sculptural installations reflect his intense social and moral concerns. His work uses large "maps" tracing the cultural and military influence of the world's imperial powers. Technical drawing and geographical maps are elaborated further through freehand drawing; his installations embrace both highly technical materials and an intensely manual practice.
The themes of colonialism and the desire for liberty led him to develop a project over the past year that addresses Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford University professor considered one of the 20th century's strongest exponents of liberalism. Ruffo's current project is titled "The rise of liberal thought in the U.S.A."
He has exhibited at M.A.D. (the Museum of Arts and Design) in New York; TEA (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes); Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany; MAXXI (the National Museum of XXI Century Arts), Rome; MACRO (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Roma); MAR (Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna); and the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, Pesaro, Italy.
In 2005 he travelled to Beslan, Russia, to work with children who survived the massacre at their local school by Chechen rebels. Ruffo has also worked on other public projects, including a sculptural proposal for Ground Zero, a special project in the psychiatric hospital in Colmar, France, and various art workshops with disadvantaged children.
Università di Trento
The legal training of Francesco Guicciardini and his political lexicon
2010-2011: Spring
Paolo Carta is professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Trento. He also taught at the École Normale SupÉrieure (LSH-Lyon). He collaborates with Il Pensiero Politico (as editor of the section Cinquecento) and with the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance. He is co-director of the journal Laboratoire italien, published by the ENS editions (École Normale SupÉrieure). His principal object of study is the history of political thought in Renaissance Europe, with a particular focus on the relationship between law and politics. Among his main publications are: Nunziature ed eresia nel Cinquecento (1999) and Ricordi politici (2003), dedicated to the history of the apostolic nunciatures in the age of Reformation; La RÉpublique en exile XVe-XVIe siècles (2002), edited with Lucie De Los Santos and Scritti sul Principe di Niccolò Machiavelli by Ugo Foscolo and Angelo Ridolfi (2004) edited with Christian del Vento and Xavier Tabet. His latest book is Francesco Guicciardini tra diritto e politica (2008). Recently he also edited Machiavel aux XIXe et XXe siècles (2007), Ordine giuridico e ordine politico (2008) and GÉographie et politique au dÉbut de l'âge moderne (2008). He is also the author of Il poeta e la polis (2003), an essay dedicated to the dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Wystan H. Auden on forgiveness. At the Italian Academy he will work on the formative years of Francesco Guicciardini and the development of his political thought. His research is also an investigation of the historical and doctrinal roots of Guicciardini's maxim: you cannot hold states according to conscience, for if you consider their origin, they are all illegitimate.
Universidad Complutense - Madrid
A king's treasures: Charles of Bourbon and the display of Herculaneum's antiquities, 1738–1746
2010-2011: Spring
Pablo Vázquez-Gestal is an early modern historian who studies the court traditions and representational strategies of the eighteenth-century European monarchies. He completed his PhD at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2008. Presently he is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, having previously been a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Research Fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples. His monograph entitled El espacio del poder ("The Space of Power") was published in 2005. In 2009 he received the Pablo de Olavide Prize for his book on the political culture of the Spanish crown in the eighteenth century. His current project analyzes different models of self-representation in the court of Charles of Bourbon in Naples.
Università per Stranieri di Siena
The educational network in Italy from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries: church, state, and society
2010-2011: Fall
Maurizio Sangalli was born in Lovere (Bergamo, Italy) in 1968 and now lives in Florence. At the University of Pavia he obtained his academic degree in Lettere moderne in 1992 (110/110 cum laude), with a thesis on the miracles in the Milanese Diocese in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, with tutor Prof. Xenio Toscani.
In 1994 he took a PhD in "Politica religione e società nella formazione dell'Europa moderna" at the Università cattolica in Milan (with Prof. Massimo Marcocchi and Prof. Cesare Mozzarelli). The title of the thesis was "Cultura politica e religione nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento."
He also obtained also scholarships from the Centro universitario cattolico, in 1993 and 1994; the Ecole française de Rome, in 1994 and 1995; and the Deutsches Historisches Institut im Rom, in 2001.
He was director of the Diocesan Library "Alessandro VII" in Siena in 1996-2003. During the same period, he was overseer within the Library of the Accademia galileiana di scienze, lettere ed arti in Padua (2000-2001), and president of the counsel and director of the scientific committee of the Centro studi per la storia del clero e dei seminari (2000-2006).
From 2003 he has been associate professor in Early Modern History at the Università per stranieri in Siena, where also teaches Medieval History. He is a University Rector's delegate to the Library of the university and a member of the staff of the university's international committee.
He has organized national and international congresses and is the coordinator of national research programs. He has been invited to hold fellowships at the Universities of Warsaw and Istanbul.
He has studied Italian social and religious history in the XVI-XVIII centuries and the history of education in the ancient Italian states. His main works are Miracoli a Milano. I processi informativi per eventi miracolosi nel Milanese in età spagnola, Ned, Milano 1993; Cultura, politica e religione nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento. Gesuiti e Somaschi a Venezia, Istituto veneto di scienze lettere ed arti, Venezia 1999; Università, Accademie, Gesuiti. Cultura e religione a Padova tra XVI e XVII secolo, Lint, Trieste 2001; Pastori pope preti rabbini. La formazione del ministro di culto in Europa (secoli XVI-XIX), atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Montalcino 26-28 febbraio 2004, Carocci, Roma 2005.The Medici Archive Project
A Society on the March: The Terzo Vecchio of the Italian Infantry (1597-1715)
2010-2011: Spring
Maurizio Arfaioli (Ph.D. in History, University of Warwick, 2002) is Adjunct Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project, an international Foundation based in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. His research interests focus on the political, social and cultural history of Renaissance and early modern Italy, with an emphasis on military history. In particular, Dr. Arfaioli has studied the rise of the Florentine military system under the reign of Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), and the role played by the Italian troops in Spanish service in early modern European conflicts. He has also been studying military iconography in frescoes, paintings and engravings, as well as the imagery in contemporary epic poetry, as historical sources. At the Italian Academy Dr. Arfaioli will carry out a study of the early modern Italian military in Spanish service, following the history of the 'Terzo Vecchio', the longest-lived unit of Italian infantry that served the Habsburg kings of Spain.
European University Institute - Florence
In others' words: foreigners, languages and interpreters in Venice, Livorno and Marseilles, c. 1700–c. 1800
2010-2011
For his Ph.D. at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute, in Florence, Mathieu Grenet wrote a dissertation dealing with the comparison of three communities of the Greek diaspora - namely those of Venice, Livorno and Marseille - from the 1770s to the 1830s. A former junior lecturer at the University of Lyon 2, France, he has taught European and French modern history for three years (2003-2006) while being an associate researcher in programs on historical demography and urban history. The author of several articles, he has published on the social and political history of the communities of the Greek diaspora, as well as on other issues such as the migratory networks and the Levant trade, and he is co-organizing a panel on "Migrant Communities and Urban Space in the Mediterranean Ports, 17th-19th centuries" for the 10th International Conference on Urban History, to be held in Ghent, Belgium, in September 2010. His research project at the Italian Academy focuses on interpreters and translators in eighteenth-centuries Italian and French port-cities, tackling the issue of cross-cultural brokerage and intermediation.
2010-2011
Marinella Senatore is a film director and director of photography who also works with drawing, painting and installation. She holds a degree from Rome's Centre for Experimental Cinematography and teaches video and photography at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University Complutense of Madrid.
Her films, photographs and installations demonstrate her interest in the arrangement of light on the set. This interest has also inspired sculptural installations (Memeland, 2005) and photographic series (Places, 2005). In recent years, Senatore has been working with storytelling as a means to involve the public in the making of artworks. In such projects, which take the form of collaborative films (such as How do U kill the Chemist,2009; Manuale per Viaggiatori, 2007; Horizontes de Sucesos, 2007; and All the things I need, 2006) she uses music as a place of exchange, where the viewer becomes participant, and the hierarchy between the artist as author and the public as recipient can be questioned and rewritten.
In other pieces the public has been involved as producer of public projects, though a microcredit system that aims at creating an alternative and socially responsible economy for cultural production. The artist takes the role of facilitator, or mediator. Along the way, this collective dimension has gradually expanded to involve students, women's communities, business associations and groups of craftspeople in stage design, set building and technical aspects, touching the very core of production. With a contribution of one or two Euros each, her most recent videos were entirely produced by thousands of people (1,200 citizens of Madrid produced the musical Speak Easy in 2009), in a choral enthusiasm founded on effective micro-relationality.
Her work fosters the construction of an archive of shared narratives that create a sense of community. Her subjects and plots are narrative occasions for complex audiovisual machines where light plays its demiurgic role, music acts as emotional catalyst, and photography carries out its governing function between the poles of reality and fiction, between the truth of the streets and the phantasmagoria of invention.
Scuola Normale Superiore - Pisa
Art history, natural history, and the science of antiquity: J. J. Winckelmann's recovery of ancient culture in Italy
2010-2011
Lorenzo Lattanzi obtained his PhD in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (2006), where he was later appointed research associate (2007) and post-doctoral fellow in History of Classical Art and Archaeology (2008-2010). He has held research fellowships from the Freie-Universität in Berlin, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München and École Normale SupÉrieure in Paris. In 2010, he was fixed-term Lecturer in Aesthetics in the PhD Program of Management and Development of Cultural Heritage at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca. He wrote two books, L'estetica musicale dell'Illuminismo tedesco (Palermo, 2001), and Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa 2002), which was awarded the "Castiglioncello-Costa dei Tirreni" Philosophy Prize in 2003. He is the author of several papers on eighteenth-century epistemology and aesthetics. In 2004, he also published the first Italian translation of M. Mendelssohn's major aesthetic works. He is currently working on a new Italian translation, with introduction and commentary, of Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums and Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst. His research focuses on modern aesthetics and art criticism within the frame of the history of ideas and studies in the Classical tradition. His current interests include the aesthetics of German Neoclassicism; cultural transfers between French and German Enlightenment theories of sentiment and sensibilitÉ; and the relationship of the Sublime with the ideas of Grace and the Tragic, from ancient rhetoric up to Kant and Schiller.
Università di Pisa
Genomics of suicidal behavior
2010-2011
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Laura Bevilacqua received her M.D. in 2005 from the University of Pisa, Italy, where she also trained as a psychiatrist. In the last two years she has been a Fogarty fellow in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA, where she focused on functional genomics and in particular on the role of serotonin and dopamine domain genes in impulsivity and dyscontrol towards the identification of functional alleles in addictions and related behaviors.
University of Haifa
Ius commune, exploitation, and emancipation
2010-2011: Fall
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion
Kenneth Stow has devoted over forty years to studying the relations between the Church and the Jews in the Middle Ages and into early modern times. His studies are both diachronic and synchronic. He has written essays tracing developments in papal policies from the early Church through the eighteenth century, and he has concentrated on the history of the Jews in Rome in the early modern period, which is to say, the longtime theoretical developments applied in practice. In all his studies, he has emphasized the role of law, canon law and ius commune, in particular, in shaping first thinking and then action with respect to the Jews. He will spend his time as a Fellow at the Italian Academy studying the texts of these two legal traditions housed in the Columbia libraries, especially those in the Diamond Law Library, which is a unique collection.
Collegio Carlo Alberto - Turin
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Global Development and Finance
Does fertility influence migration and the re-allocation of labor?
2010-2011: Fall
Giovanni Mastrobuoni obtained a PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2006. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Collegio Carlo Alberto and a research fellow at CeRP and at Netspar (in the Netherlands). His research focuses on labor economics and on the economics of crime. He has published in international journals and has received several research grants and several awards including the 2009 Carlo Giannini Prize for the best paper presented at the Italian Congress of Econometrics and Empirical Economics, the 2008 Steven H. Sandell Grant Award from Boston College, the 2007 Honorable Mention Dissertation Award from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and the 2007 National Academy of Social Insurance's Heinz Dissertation Award. He also serves as the vice-director of the Master in Economics at the Collegio Carlo Alberto.
Università di Palermo
On the trail of Frederick II: European nationalism and the rediscovery of medieval architecture in Southern Italy
2010-2011: Fall
Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino studied in Palermo and Madrid (Progetto Erasmus at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura), took a Laurea in Architecture in 1999 and received her Ph.D. in History of Architecture from the University of Palermo in 2004. She has taught History of Architecture in Palermo (2004-2009) as "professore a contratto" and has has been granted numerous fellowships: Progetto Giovani Ricercatori at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in MÉxico City, Assegno di ricerca at the University of Palermo, DAAD Research Fellowship at the Technische Universität München, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, Humboldt-Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Technische Universität München. Her main interest is the History of Architecture in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. She focuses mostly on Eclecticism, Revivalism, Travelers and the Grand Tour, with particular attention to Italian-German relations. She has published widely on these themes; for example, she authored Serradifalco e la Germania. La Stildiskussion tra Sicilia e Baviera 1823-1850 (2004) and Francesco Saverio Cavallari (1810-1896). Architetto senza frontiere tra Sicilia Germania e Messico (2007). In 2004 she co-organized the international conference The Time of Schinkel and the Age of Neoclassicism between Palermo and Berlin and edited the acts of the conference (2006). Currently she is working on Italian Influence on German Architecture after the Second World War. Her research at the Italian Academy focuses on the impact of 19th-century European nationalism on the rediscovery and interpretation of southern Italian medieval architecture.
Università di Roma
Climate changes from decade to century: flood/drought dynamics
2010-2011: Fall
Co-sponsored by the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia
Francesco Cioffi (Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering) is Associate Professor in Hydraulics in the 'Dipartimento di Idraulica Trasporti e Strade' of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza.' Dr. Francesco Cioffi's areas of expertise are experimental hydraulics (laboratory and field velocity and turbulence measurements), hydraulic and water quality mathematical models, solid transport models, and environmental hydraulics. He has collaborated on a significant number of projects funded by Italian public institutions. These projects have concerned a number of applied research topics: control and management of erosion phenomena in coastal zones, inshore and offshore aquaculture plants, recovery and management of the water quality of lagoons, rivers and lakes, control of tidal phenomena in the Venice lagoon, and the management of solid transport in river and reservoirs. Recently Prof. Cioffi has been involved in an international research project aimed at developing projections of mid-latitude rainfall patterns related to anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions.
University of Vermont
The Jews of Italy and Spanish imperial power
2010-2011: Fall
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion
Flora Cassen grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. She received her BA in Law and History from the Free University of Brussels, her MA in Comparative History from Brandeis University, and her PhD in History and Judaic Studies from New York University in 2007. At the Italian Academy, she will complete her book manuscript "Identity or Control: the Jewish badge in Renaissance Italy." Based on her doctoral research, this book studies the discriminatory marks, typically a yellow hat or a yellow badge, that the Jews were compelled to wear in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy. Her work contributes to understanding the social life of the Jews in Renaissance Italy, the relations they had with secular or religious authorities, and how clothing can be used to regulate society. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Belgian Academy of Rome, the Medieval Academy of America, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. In 2011 she will start working as an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Università di Bergamo
The political contribution of Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Gaetano Salvemini to Hermann Broch's democratic project
2010-2011: Fall
Ester Saletta graduated in English and German Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy, 1995). She obtained her PhD in Austrian Literature at the University of Vienna (Austria, 2005). She won several Austrian scholarships (ÖAD in 1999; BMBW in 2005; Linzer StifterHaus in 2007) and she taught Italian at the Language International Center of the University of Vienna (2001-2004). She is now teaching German as foreign language in the Italian secondary school system. At present she collaborates with the Law Faculty of the University of Bergamo (Italy) in the Equal Opportunities field. She is an active member of the Viennese Friedrich Hebbel and Theodor Kramer Societies, of the International Centre "Hermann Broch" (IAB), of the International German Association (IVG) and of the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association (MALCA).
Università di Genova
Mathematical monsters: the essential tension between normal and pathological in modern mathematics
2010-2011: Spring
Claudio Bartocci (Ph.D. in mathematics, University of Warwick, UK, 1993) is associate professor at the University of Genova, where he teaches mathematical physics and history of mathematics. He has had visiting positions at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the UniversitÉ de Paris VII, the University of Philadelphia, and the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has authored some 40 refereed papers (mostly in mathematical physics and differential and algebraic geometry), 2 research monographs, and several essays on the history of mathematical thought, on the relations between mathematics and literature, and on various issues in philosophy of science. Among his more recent publications: "Fourier-Mukai and Nahm transforms in geometry and mathematical physics" (co-authors: U. Bruzzo and D. Hernández RuipÉrez, Birkhäuser 2009), "Vite matematiche" (co-authsor: R. Betti, A. Guerraggio, R. Lucchetti, Springer 2007; English translation forthcoming), "Racconti matematici" (Einaudi 2006); he is the coeditor, together with P. Odifreddi, of "La matematica" (Einaudi). He is presently completing a book, "Mostri matematici" (Cortina Editore, Milano), about the conceptual development of 19th / early 20th century mathematics, with special emphasis on the role of pathological examples. At the Italian Academy he will investigate the philosophical implications of this research work.
European University Institute - Florence
Byzantine and Italian travel books in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
2010-2011: Spring
Anthony (Tony) Molho is Professor of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, having before taught (from 1966 to 2000) at Brown University, from which he retired as the David Herlihy University Professor Emeritus. His scholarly interests encompass the history of Italy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, with special emphasis on the history of Florence in the Renaissance; the Mediterranean world in the age of the great empires (from the fifteenth century to the rise of the national states in the early nineteenth century), with a focus on the transcultural commercial networks, especially in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In recent years he has been drawn to the study of the histories of those European scholars, mostly Jews, who were forced to leave their homes in the 1930s, to settle in the United States. Tony Molho's CV is available here; a list of his publications can be found here. In 2010, he was awarded the Galileo Galilei Prize.
Columbia University
Neural bases of musical experience
2010-2011
Alessia Pannese studied music theory (Conservatorio di musica di Roma "Santa Cecilia"), law (Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza"), veterinary medicine (Università degli studi di Perugia), veterinary neuroscience (University of Cambridge, UK), and neurobiology (Columbia University). Her research interests span across medical (anaesthesia, natural and induced altered states of consciousness), cognitive (self-awareness, learning, brain laterality and plasticity), philosophical (philosophy of science), and art-related fields (creativity, esthetic resonance). For her doctoral work, she investigated the neural correlates of self-face perception and self-consciousness. During her appointment as "Art & Neuroscience Fellow" she plans to explore the neuronal response to sound in musicians and non-musicians. Her long-term goal is to contribute to the development of cross-cultural discourse between artistic and scientific thought, as a way to achieve synthesis of knowledge and generation of common understanding.