Fordham University
The color of the Republic: “race” and the boundaries of the nation in post-Fascist Italy
2016-2017: Fall
Silvana Patriarca received her laurea at the University of Turin and her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Florida, and is currently a professor in the Department of History of Fordham University. She specializes in the history of modern Italy and her research has ranged from the social history of industrialization to the intellectual and political history of statistics to the cultural history of nationalism and the construction of national identities in their intersection with gender and “race.” The author of the award-winning Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press) and of Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge University Press), she has co-edited (with Lucy Riall) The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan). An essay based on her current research and entitled “Fear of Small Numbers: ‘Brown Babies’ in Postwar Italy” was recently published in the journal Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ’900. She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (North Carolina) and at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in Paris.
Web page: http://www.fordham.edu/info/20762/faculty/6421/silvana_patriarca%0A
Former Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Distinguished Visiting Fellow in connection with the Academy's International Observatory for Cultural Heritage
2016-2017: Spring
Salvatore Settis is the former Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (1994–1999) and of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1999–2010), where he also taught Classical Archaeology and Art History. He was Warburg Professor at the University of Hamburg (1991) and delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2000), the A.W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2001), and the Lectures of the Cátedra del Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2010-11). He was also appointed as Professor of the Borromini Chair at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland (2014-2015), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Institut de France, the American Philosophical Society, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, and of the Academies of Sciences in Berlin, Munich, Brussels, and Turin. He currently chairs the Scientific Council of the Musée du Louvre. Settis’ research interests focus on ancient and Renaissance art history, and his numerous publications include If Venice Dies (2016), Azione popolare: Cittadini per il bene comune (2012), Artisti e committenti fra Quattro e Cinquecento (2010), and The Future of the Classical (2006). He was the editor of The Classical Tradition (with Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 2010), I Greci. Storia, arte, cultura, società, vols. 1–6 (1995–2002), Memoria dell’Antico nell’arte italiana, vols. 1–3 (1984–86), and is the general editor of the series Mirabilia Italiae. For his interest in the preservation of landscape and cultural heritage, Settis has been Chair of Italy’s High Council for Cultural Heritage and Landscape (2007–2009). He has been awarded two honorary degrees in Law by the University of Padua (2007) and the University of Rome Tor Vergata (2008), and one in Architecture by the University of Reggio Calabria (2013).
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
In Search of Origins: Making Etruscans into Italics and Italics into Italians
2016-2017: Fall
Sabina Loriga is Professor in History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She leads the International Workshop on the Public Uses of the Past, part of the “Laboratoire d’excellence” TEPSIS: Transformation of the State, Politicization of Society, Institutionalization of Social Issues. She is also editor of the journal Passés Futurs.
Her research focuses on the relationships between history and biography, the construction of historical time, and public uses of the past. Notable publications include: Le petit x. De la biographie à l’histoire (Paris, Seuil, 2010); Soldats. Un laboratoire disciplinaire: l’armée piémontaise au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Belles Lettres, 2007); La juste mémoire. Lectures autour de Paul Ricœur (Geneva, Labor et Fides, 2006, in collaboration with Olivier Abel et al.)
Web page: http://gehm.ehess.fr/index.php?3047
Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele
Public indifference to the loss of cultural heritage and identity
2016-2017: Spring
Roberta De Monticelli is Full Professor for Philosophy of Personhood at San Raffaele University, Milan, and Director of PERSONA (Research Centre in Phenomenology and Sciences of the Person, http://www.unisr.it/ - see also its forum, Phenomenology Lab, www.phenomenologylab.eu/)
She is currently Chief Editor of “Phenomenology and Mind” – The Online Journal of PERSONA (http://www.phenomenologyandmind.eu/). From 1989 to 2004 she was Full Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the Université de Genève. Her permanent domains of research are defined by a Phenomenological approach to Mind and Personhood: Norms and Values – Feeling/Emotions – Will/Decisions – Personal Identity – Embodied Cognition. Her long term research aims at a cognitive foundation of practical reason, needed to counteract mainstream ethical scepticism and axiological disenchantment, while rejecting both Constructivism and Metaphysical Realism as unsatisfactory alternatives in current meta-ethical debate. Yet the comprehensive frame of this research is not Moral Philosophy, but a theory of Personhood, including moral as well as any other value-guided type of agency, and integrating emotional sensibility as an ultimate source of evidence and justification for value judgments of very different sort. At the Italian Academy she will develop her program of a cognitive foundation of value judgments by considering the paradigmatic example of beauty and its emotional perception, focusing on a new and widespread type of practical and axiological scepticism, as exemplified by public indifference (or even insensitivity) to the loss of cultural heritage and identity.
Web page: http://www.unisr.it/en/k-teacher/demonticelli-roberta/
University of Pittsburgh
Mental time travel
2016-2017: Fall
Markus Kneer is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a PhD in philosophy, an MA in cognitive sciences (both from the Institut Jean Nicod, ENS/EHESS Paris) and a BA in philosophy, politics and economics (University of Oxford). His research focuses on various topics in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and the cognitive sciences broadly conceived.
Università di Napoli Federico II
The role of formins in synaptotoxic damage and cognitive decline induced by amyloid beta
2016-2017: Spring
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Maria Elena Pero is an Assistant Professor in Veterinary Physiology and Lecturer in Veterinary Neurophysiology at the Università di Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy. She holds an M.D. in Veterinary Medicine and a PhD in Comparative Morphology and Physiology. She was a visiting scientist at the Taub Institute of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the Aging Brain at Columbia University where she conducted research to elucidate the mechanisms by which physiological levels of amyloid beta peptide (Aβ1-42), the peptide that abnormally accumulates in the brains of AD patients, positively modulates synaptic plasticity. During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will focus on the pathological role played by neurotoxic levels of Aβ1-42 on synaptic plasticity through formin-mediated regulation of the neuronal cytoskeleton using cellular and animal models of Alzheimer’s disease.
Università di Milano
Machiavelli, the disappearance of the Etruscans, and the destructive force of religions
2016-2017: Fall
Marco Geuna has been an Associate Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy in the State University of Milan since 2000. The author and editor of several books, he has published articles on modern political philosophers, on the republican tradition and neo-republicanism, and on the just war tradition and its critics.
In recent years he has focused his research on Machiavelli’s ideas and on the relationship between religion and politics in modern philosophies. Working for a semester at the Italian Academy will enable him not only to continue the line of research he has been following for some time, but also to put together and write the first chapter of a larger work dedicated to the genealogy of the relationship between religion and violence in modern thought.
Web page: http://dipartimento.filosofia.unimi.it/index.php/marco-geuna
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Louvre on fire: history of a false report
2016-2017: Spring
Manfred Posani Löwenstein received his Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 2015 with a thesis on the concept of the unconscious in the historiography of Jacob Burckhardt. He is currently working on both the French and Italian critical editions of Nietzsche’s philological writings (Les Belles Lettres, Adelphi). At the Italian Academy he will investigate the reactions raised by the false report of the burning of the Louvre during the Paris Commune (1871).
Web page: https://scuola.academia.edu/ManfredPosaniLöwenstein
Columbia University
Investigating the physiology of dopamine neurons in pre-clinical Parkinson's Disease
2016-2017: Spring
Mahalakshmi Somayaji is a postdoctoral research scientist at the department of Molecular Therapeutics, Columbia University, New York. She obtained Ph.D in Biochemistry, Chemistry and Pharmacy from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. The main research focus during her graduate studies was in the development of experimental mouse models relevant to Parkinson disease (PD) and to understand the etiology of PD. She investigated the physiology of dopaminergic (DA) neurons, the loss of which results in the onset and pathogenesis of PD. Her research was the first to identify the precise anatomical localization and in vivo physiology of DA neurons, to understand differential pre-symptomatic vulnerability in response to stressors in PD. Her postdoctoral research includes understanding the synaptic physiology of DA neurons in the pre-symptomatic mouse models of PD and to investigate the role of DA pathway in regulating appetite.
List of her peer-reviewed publications: (Maiden name: Mahalakshmi Subramaniam)
Book Chapter
- Subramaniam*, M., Roeper, J. “Subtypes of midbrain dopamine neurons”, Handbook of Basal Ganglia Structure and Function, Second Edition (2016).
Papers in Peer-Reviewed Journals
- Subramaniam*, M., Althof, D., Gispert, S., Schwenk, J., Auburger, G., Kulik, A., & Roeper, J. (2014). Mutant α-synuclein enhances firing frequencies in dopamine substantia nigra neurons by oxidative impairment of A-type potassium channels. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(41), 13586-99.
- Subramaniam*, M., Kern, B., Vogel, S., Klose, V., Schneider, G., & Roeper, J. (2014). Selective increase of in vivo firing frequencies in DA SN neurons after proteasome inhibition in the ventral midbrain. European Journal of Neuroscience, 40(6), 2898-2909.
- Dominguez-Bautista, J. A., Klinkenberg, M., Brehm, N., Subramaniam*, M., Kern, B., Roeper, J., Auburger, G & Jendrach, M. (2015). Loss of lysosome-associated membrane protein 3 (LAMP3) enhances cellular vulnerability against proteasomal inhibition. European journal of cell biology, 94(3), 148-61.
- Aishwarya, S., Mahalakshmi, S*, & Sehgal, P. K. (2008). Collagen-coated polycaprolactone microparticles as a controlled drug delivery system. Journal of microencapsulation, 25(5), 298-306.
Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain
Craft heritage and global branding under Chinese hegemony: “Made in Italy” textiles in New York
2016-2017: Fall
Lynda Dematteo graduated from Sciences Po Lille (1996) and obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology under the supervision of Marc Abélès at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris (2002). She undertook an anthropological study of the Northern League based on classic analyses of the rites of inversion. The synthesis of her PhD was published by the French CNRS Éditions under the title: L’idiotie en politique(2007) and by Feltrinelli, L’idiota in politica (2011). After teaching at Lille 3 University, she joined the Montreal Centre for International Studies as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Prof. Mariella Pandolfi. She was recruited by the CNRS in 2008 to carry out studies on the impact of globalization on political life in Europe, particularly by exploring strategies to promote and defend the “Made in Italy” label on a global scale. She aims to highlight the complex and paradoxical links between globalization and the rise of economic patriotism. She participated in a long-term collaborative ethnographic research project with the WTO in Geneva from 2008 to 2010 and she is currently involved in a new collaborative project, “The Political Life of Commodities,” implemented by the Norbert Elias Centre in Marseilles. This international consortium is developing an anthropology of unprecedented transformations in the interplay between economy and politics. Through her ethnography of the “Milano Unica” trade show, Lynda Dematteo reflects on how the internationalization of industrial processes threatens a specific material cultural heritage and changes the meaning that tradespeople give to national identity. In New York City, she will explore the history of relationships established between ethnic business communities to better understand the current emergence of an Italo-Chinese fashion scene.
Web page: http://www.iiac.cnrs.fr/article1928.html
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Jewish persecution and looted art in Italy: evidence and denial, 1938–2015
2016-2017: Spring
Ilaria Pavan is Assistant Professor in Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Her main research interest is the history of Italian Jews and Italian antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on the Fascist and post–Fascist period. She published several books on these topics such as "Il podestà ebreo. La storia di Renzo Ravenna tra fascismo e leggi razziali" (Laterza 2006) and, with M. Al Kalak, "Un’altra fede. Le case dei catecumeni in area estense. 1583–1938" (Olschki 2013). She is the editor in chief of the journal "Contemporanea. XIX and XX Century History Review." She is currently working on a book exploring the relations between the development of forms of transitional justice and the politics of Jewish retributions in the post-Shoah era.
Web page: http://homepage.sns.it/pavan/
Columbia University
Heritage Wars: The Erasure of History in Iraq and Syria
2016-2017: Fall
Co-sponsored by the “Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments” project (Columbia University)
Helen Malko is a Research Associate at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She received a PhD in archaeology and anthropology from Stony Brook University, and a Master’s degree in archaeology of the Ancient Near East from Baghdad University. She holds a diploma in Historic Preservation from Rutgers University. Her current research is focused on the ongoing deliberate destruction of monuments and historical landscapes in Iraq and Syria, and the related changes in the rhetoric of heritage studies and archaeological ethics that have accompanied this destruction. In particular, she is analyzing the renewed ideologies of preservation and rescue that have revived paradigms of the nineteenth century archaeology. Other areas of her research and scholarly interest include the understanding of cultural interaction in antiquity, ideas of historical consciousness, and antiquarianism in Mesopotamia. Helen has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Turkey and Iraq, and is currently the content manager for the website of the Columbia project “Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments".
Web page: https://columbia.academia.edu/HelenMalk
2016-2017: Spring
Gian Maria Tosatti’s projects are generally long-term investigations of specific topics related to the concept of identity, from the political to the spiritual. His first series of projects include Devozioni (2005-2011) which concerned archetypes of the modern era and comprised ten installations, all in buildings in Rome, and Landscapes (2006-current), a public art project focused on areas of urban conflict.
Among Tosatti’s current projects are Fondamenta (2011- current), based on the identification of contemporary archetypes and Le considerazioni (2009 - current) on the enigmas of personal memory and the traces that human beings leave behind them. From 2013-16 his research focused on Sette Stagioni dello Spirito, a work that has embodied the entire city of Naples.
In 2011 he curated RELOAD, a prototype of cultural urban intervention about the temporary use of uninhabited spaces. He is the founder of the project La Costruzione di una Cosmologia (www.unacosmologia.com).
Tosatti, a journalist and essayist, was editor in chief of the weekly cultural newspaper La Differenza and has written for several Italian newspapers and magazines. He is currently a columnist at the publication, Artribune on Opera Viva. He writes essays about art and politics.
His work has been exhibited at the Hessel Museum of CCS BARD (New York, 2014), the MADRE museum (Naples, 2016), the Lower Manhattan Community Council (New York, 2011), the Galleria Nazionale (Rome, 2017), American Academy in Rome (Rome, 2013), Museo Villa Croce (Genoa, 2012) Andrew Freedman Home (New York, 2012), Tenuta dello Scompiglio (Lucca, 2012), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Roma, 2008), Chelsea Art Museum (New York, 2009), BJCEM (Ancona, 2014), Centrale Montemartini – Musei Capitolini (Rome, 2007), Wilfredo Lam Museum (Havana, 2015), Casa Testori (Milano, 2014), MAAM (Roma - permanent), Castel Sant’Elmo (Naples, permanent).
Institut Jean Nicod
The territory of the self: between perception and action
2016-2017: Spring
Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. She pursues philosophical and experimental investigation of the notion of self-awareness, in its relation to social awareness and to bodily awareness. Questions about the notion of embodiment have been at the core of her research. The recent theoretical trend of embodied cognition tries to bring the mind to the body. In her work, she returns the body to the mind. She has a forthcoming book, Mind the Body, on bodily self-awareness to be published by Oxford University Press. She has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on social cognition, empathy, bodily sensations, pain, touch, body schema, peripersonal space, and the sense of bodily ownership.
Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Renegotiating memory and identity in the postwar Mezzogiorno: destruction, restoration, and reinvention of medieval architecture in Southern Italy
2016-2017: Spring
Francesco Gangemi is the scientific assistant at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte of Rome. A longtime collaborator of the Sapienza University of Rome, where he received his Ph.D. in the field of History of Medieval Art, he has also collaborated with museums and Soprintendenze, and with the State Archive of Rome, where he received the “Diploma in Archivistica, Paleografia e Diplomatica.” Between 2014 and 2016 he was awarded a Post-Doc Fellowship by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and in 2015 he was visiting scholar at Duke University (NC).
After publishing a book and some essays about Romanesque architecture and sculpture in central Italy, he worked on the Adriatic area during the Norman-Staufer age. He was co-editor of the books Il potere dell’arte nel Medioevo (2015), and Federico II e la riedizione dell’Iconavetere a Foggia (2014), and organized the international conferences “Il Piceno prima di Fiastra” (2010), “L’apogeo di Ravello nel Mediterraneo” (2015), and "Imperialis Ecclesia” (2016). He is currently researching the relationship between the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen and sacred architecture, and working on a second book on the changes of the built environment in Adriatic Italy during the Staufer age. At the Italian Academy, he will focus on the reinvention of medieval architecture in the postwar reconstruction of Southern Italy.
Web page: http://www.biblhertz.it/institut/mitarbeiter-und-gaeste/mitarbeiterdaten...
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici
The classical antiquities trade between Italy and the United States, 1861–1939
2016-2017: Fall
Francesca de Tomasi (Lecce, 1985) is an archaeologist interested in the history of collecting and collections. She received her Ph.D. in Classical Antiquities and their Fortune in 2015 from the University of Rome Tor Vergata and she later obtained a post-doctoral Fellowship at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples. Her research focuses on the export and trade of antiquities in post-unification Italy and on the network of museums, collectors, art dealers, intermediaries, purchasing agents and scholars involved in the antiquarian market. Francesca will join the Italian Academy as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her research project aims to analyze the dynamics of the export of antiquities from Italy to the United States between 1861 and 1939, to reveal the extent of the trafficking of archaeological objects which today constitute a significant portion of American museum collections. Moreover, she will investigate how American museum culture was influenced by its connections with the flourishing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century antiquarian market, showing the deep connections between the market and the museums’ and collectors’ choices and artistic taste.
University of Pennsylvania
Architectural culture in translation: postwar Italian cities and African villages
2016-2017: Fall
Dr. Elisa Dainese is an architect and a historian, and she is currently a lecturer and Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is developed in connection with the University of Pennsylvania (History of Art Department), Harvard University (Department of African and African American Studies), and the IUAV University of Venice (Faculty of Architecture). The project explores the key role that sub-Saharan Africa played in the development of modern architecture in Europe and America from the 1940s to the 1970s.
In 2012, Dr. Dainese earned her PhD in Architectural Design at the IUAV University of Venice (Italy), with a dissertation focused on post-war architecture, Aldo van Eyck, and the fascination for Dogon art and architecture of Mali (Africa). Dr. Dainese is the author of articles and essays published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (“Histories of Exchange: Indigenous South Africa in the South African Architectural Record and the Architectural Review”, Dec 2015), Le Corbusier, 50 years later (2015), New Urban Configurations (2014), Nuove qualità del vivere in periferia (2013), Landscape and Imagination (2013), and Catalogo della Mostra Internazionale Triennale d’Architettura Milano (2012).
Dr. Dainese is a colloquium member of the Humanities+Urbanism+Design initiative, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation at MIT. Dr. Dainese served as co-curator of both the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010), IUAV AFRICA - Rwanda Pavilion, and the Milan Triennale of Architecture (2013) where she focused on World Architecture.
Web page: www.elisadainese.com
2016-2017: Spring
Danilo Correale’s work analyzes aspects of human life, such as labor-leisure and sleep, through the lenses of time and the body.
His work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including the 16th Quadriennal of Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Pigs, Artium Museum, Spain (2016), Ennesima, Trienniale Milano (2015), Kiev Biennial (2015), Museion, Bolzano (2015) Per-formare una collezione, Madre Museum Naples (2014), Steirischer herbst, Graz, (2013) Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2012), Manifesta 8 in Murcia/Cartagena (2010), Moscow Biennial, Moscow (2010), Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2009).
Recent solo shows include Tales of Exhaustion. La Loge, Brussels BE (2016) The Missing hour: Rhythms and Algorithms, Raucci/Santamaria, Naples (2015); The Warp and the Weft, Peep-Hole, Milan (2012); Pareto Optimality, Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2011); and Entrèe, Bergen (2011).
Correale is the founder of the Decelerationist Reader and a regular contributor to publications in the field of critical theory. He recently published The Game: A three sided football match, FeC, Fabriano (2014) and No More Sleep No More, Archive Books, Berlin, 2015.
Born in Naples in 1982, Correale lives and works in New York and Naples.
2016-2017: Spring
Chiara Fumai’s project examined the metaphysical representation of evil, inspired by the writings of psychoanalyst and Christian occultist Dion Fortune. Although unable to complete her residency, she began an artwork that used cosmic debris as a metaphor, in which the debris would speak, using words from “The Gospel of Diana,” an apocryphal late nineteenth-century publication about the revolt and superiority of nature over humanity.
Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (UMR7323 du CNRS – UFR Université François-Rabelais de Tours)
Ippolito I d’Este’s music room: reconstructing a lost collection
2016-2017: Fall
Camilla Cavicchi is a musicologist associated with the Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours (France). In 2006, she was awarded a doctorate in musicology and musical heritage by the Università di Bologna, with a thesis on the French composer Maistre Jhan (1512–1538). In 2007 she began work on her CNRS post-doctorate on Renaissance singers prosopography at the Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance. She taught organology at the Università di Bologna and history of music at the Université de Montpellier. She takes a multidisciplinary approach to researching the history of music in Renaissance Europe and the Mediterranean; drawing from archives, prosopography, music iconography, organology and ethnomusicology, and focussing on three major fields: court music, regional and popular traditions. She has published on the subjects of musical iconography, organology, the history of musical institutions in the Renaissance, and orally transmitted musical repertoires, especially those of barbers and singers of tales.
Sapienza – Università di Roma
Portraits, behaviors and inclusion: the construction of cultural and biological heritage through images during the 17th and 18th centuries
2016-2017: Fall
Dr. Benedetta Borello earned her PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) (2000) [Thesis title: Du patriciat urbain à la Chaire de Saint Pierre: les Pamphiljs du XV au XVIII siècle], and her PhD at the Università di Napoli L’Orientale (2000) [Thesis title: La socialità aristocratica a Roma: reti di relazioni femminili fuori e dentro la famiglia]. Currently, she is a research fellow at the Department of History of «La Sapienza» Università di Roma and she teaches Early Modern and Modern History at the Department of Humanities at the Università dell’Aquila.The main areas of her research activity are history of the family and gender history, history of the élites, network analysis and public opinion, especially in the early modern period. She has been a Research Fellow, ENBacH – European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage, a project promoted and economically supported by the European Commission through the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) which concerned and involved a network of 8 universities located in 6 different European countries (Universitat de Barcelona, Technische Universität, Dresden, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris, Università di Roma «La Sapienza», Università di Teramo, Uniwersytet Warszawski, and Universität Wien). For this project she worked on «Spaces, publics and “public spheres” in baroque Rome». The problem of the definition of “public” and “public sphere” is put at the intersection between the history of publication, urban history, social and cultural history. To some extent, it is the space (and the place) that imposes norms to men and women who use the place to act as political subjects. By means of some examples, she entered the literary milieu of baroque Rome, showing its mechanisms of publication and censorship and, by means of the interactive map of Rome on the EnBACH website, she showed the spaces where political communication and religious controversy took place. In 2006 she was also Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She is the author of Trame sovrapposte. La socialità aristocratica e le reti di relazioni femminili a Roma (XVII-XVIII secolo), (Naples, 2003), and Il posto di ciascuno. Fratelli, sorelle e fratellanze (XVI-XIX secolo) (Rome, 2016), and, with Renata Ago, she is the editor of Famiglie. Circolazione di beni, circuiti di affetti in età moderna (Rome, 2008) and the editor of Pubblico e pubblici di Antico Regime (Pisa, 2009). During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will be working on a book project dedicated to “Portraits, Behaviour and Inclusion. The Construction of Cultural and Biological Heritage through Images (Rome, 17th and 18th Centuries).” The project will consider the figures portrayed in their physical (the family home or the monastery) and historical (Rome in the 17th century) contexts and the visual effect achieved by the images.
Universiteit Maastricht
Emotion and the brain
2016-2017: Spring
Beatrice de Gelder is Professor of Social and Affective Neuroscience at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Her main areas of expertise are visual and audio-visual affective processes related to the perception of faces and bodies as well as auditory affective signals. She has extensive experience in designing and executing behavioral, functional and anatomical imaging studies, both in healthy and diseased populations, and has participated in funded research involving populations from diverse cultural backgrounds. Her current research focuses on face and body recognition and, recently, the neuroscience of art. She is currently serving as Editor in Chief of Frontiers of Emotion Science and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Psychopathology. In 2012, she was awarded an advanced European Research Council (ERC) scientific grant for the study of cultural differences in emotional body expression. In addition to Maastricht University, she holds appointments at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and University College London (UCL). Her book on “Emotions and the Body” has recently been published by Oxford University Press.
University of Birmingham
Cognition, biases, and rationality: studies in the philosophy and psychology of judgment and decision-making
2016-2017: Spring
Andrea Polonioli holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. He has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Sidney Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Medicine and Technology, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He will soon start working as a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Birmingham as part of a project exploring the Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts (PERFECT). His area of specialization is philosophy of psychology and his work is interdisciplinary and empirically informed. He is committed to treating philosophy as a tool for practical engagement with the world. He also has research interests in science ethics and scientometrics.
Web page: www.andreapolonioli.com
Politecnico di Milano
How Architects Address the Urban Memory of the Violent Past
2016-2017: Fall
Dr. Aleksandar Staničić is an independent researcher, architectural theorist and critic, and practicing architect. He received his Ph.D. in Architectural Composition from the Politecnico di Milano in 2014, with the Doctor Europaeus Certification. His research examines the phenomena of calculated destruction of architecture in modern-day conflicts, the fabrication of identity and memory via the (mis)treatment of architectural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, and disaster resilience. Dr. Staničić's work philosophy is based on coalescing architectural practice with scholarly theories, teaching and research. At the Italian Academy he will investigate the response of architectural design to the political destruction of buildings as part of the forthcoming book manuscript Vocabulary of the Architecture of Disaster.