Fellows 2017–2018

  • Stanford University

    The origins of political economy in Early Modern Italy and the Islamic world

    2017-2018; Fall

    Vasileios Syros is a Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland. His teaching and research interests converge at the intersection of the history of Christian/Latin, Jewish, and Islamic political thought and Comparative Political Theory. Syros has published Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Cultures and Traditions of Learning (University of Toronto Press, 2012); Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua (Brill, 2007); and Well Begun is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources (ACMRS, 2011). His work has appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals, including Viator, Journal of Early Modern History, Medieval Encounters, Journal of World History, Philosophy East & West, History of Political Thought, and Revue des Études Juives. Syros is the Principal Investigator for the research project “Political Power in the European and Islamic Worlds” (2014–18). He has taught previously at Stanford University, McGill University, The University of Chicago, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). Syros has received fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

  • University of Cambridge

    Plants, poisons, and Paleolithic hunters

    2017-2018: Fall

    Dr. Valentina Borgia graduated with a degree in Archaeology from the University of Siena (Italy), where she earned her PhD in Prehistory with a thesis on the functional aspects of Palaeolithic stone projectile tools. Her scientific background encompasses a range of topics that span from lithic and bone tools technology to Palaeolithic population subsistence economy and prehistoric art; nevertheless, the study of hunting weapons has been the focal point of her research. Her approach to the complexity of prehistoric hunting strategies is multidisciplinary and combines typological and technological data with functional and residues analysis. Such data are also evaluated through the use of ethnographic comparison as well as experimental archaeology. She is currently involved in a research project focused on the invention and the diffusion of long-range hunting with throwing weapons. This project builds on a recently concluded Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (UK) and is aimed at investigating the first Anatomically Modern Humans stone and bone projectiles points from the perspectives of technology, use-wear, and residues analysis. The detection of poisonous substances on ancient arrows is part of this project. The aim of this fascinating research, which involves scholars engaged in researching Palaeolithic hunting strategies from various points of view (Archaeology, Paleobotany, Ethnography, Chemistry, Forensic Toxicology, Ethnopharmacy, etc.), is to understand when the first poison arrows were used, building a database with ethnographic and historic samples.

  • University of Mississippi

    A composer listens: Luciano Berio’s nineteenth century

    2017-2018: Fall

    Thomas Peattie is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Mississippi. He holds degrees in composition and musicology from the University of Calgary and a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, and the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel). In addition to an essay in the collection Mahler and his World, his articles and reviews have appeared in Acta MusicologicaJournal of the Royal Musical AssociationMusic and LettersMitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, and Naturlaut. He is the author of Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

    His current book project explores the idea of transcription in the music of the late Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003). Focusing on Berio’s sustained engagement with the music of his predecessors (including Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Boccherini, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Giuseppe Verdi, Gustav Mahler, and Giacomo Puccini), the book considers the relationship between this rich repertory of co-authored works and Berio’s broader compositional practice, a practice informed, in part, by the way in which the composer listened to the past.

     

  • University of Bologna

    Islamophobia as a democratic challenge

    2017-2018: Spring

    Susanna Mancini (Ph.D., European University Institute, 1995; JD, University of Bologna, 1991) is the Chair of Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Bologna School of Law. She is also affiliated to the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, and she is a recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University (Budapest) and the Cardozo School of Law (New York City). She has taught at the Fordham School of Law (New York City), at the Toulouse School of Law (France) and at the Radyzner School of Law of the Interdisciplinary Center (Israel). Susanna is the Italian member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law, and she served as the chair of the program committee for the World Congress of Constitutional Law (Oslo, 2014). 

    Susanna’s research has a strong interdisciplinary focus. She approaches law in its cultural dimension through which it incorporates social practices and features in the construction of social relations. She is interested in exploring how race and gender-related social and cultural constructs have shaped the balance of power and privilege in a liberal society, and in the role of the law in perpetuating and/or combating the marginalization of women and of racial, religious and sexual minorities. Her work explores issue of law and religion, reproductive rights, the partnership of feminism and multiculturalism, and the protection of ethnic minorities. Her latest publications include two co-edited volumes (with Michel Rosenfeld), Constitutional Secularism in an Age of Religious Revival (Oxford University Press, 2014), and The Conscience Wars (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2017) and the casebook Comparative Constitutional Law. Cases and Materials (with Norman Dorsen Michel Rosenfeld, Andras Sajo and Susanne Baer, West, 2016). 

    Susanna’s present research focuses on the democratic challenge posed by anti-Muslim populism in contemporary liberal democracies. Drawing on a comparison between contemporary Islamophobia, traditional anti-Semitism and American racial segregation, she explores how the construction of a racialized outcast signals a deviation from the pluralistic model of democracy and sets the premises for a Schmittian identitarian derailment. 

    Web page: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/susanna.mancini/en

  • Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

    Archaeology of rights: petitions and mercy in early modern societies

    2017-2018: Spring

    Simona Cerutti is currently Directrice d’Etudes à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She was co-director (together with Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi) of the book series Microstorie (Einaudi, 1985-1990). In 1989 she became co-director of the journal Quaderni Storici, and in 2015 she became a member of the Research Community (WOG) Urban Agency at University of Antwerp, coordinated by Bert De Munck.

    Her main interests concern social classifications and hierarchies in early modern societies, with particular attention to the culture of law in the language and in the categories of social actors. The social belonging of places and the claims of rights to local resources are at the heart of her most recent works. She is responsible for an international research group (Citoyenneté et propriété au nord et au sud de la Méditerranée, XVIe-XIXe siècles: 2016-2020), comprised of students engaged in a comparative project on “citizenship” both in northern and the southern regions of the Mediterranean. She is developing a reflection on the future of social history and the developments of micro-historical methods. Currently she is writing a book on petitions and communication with authorities in early modern Italian societies. 

    Her publications include: La ville et les métiers, Naissance d'un langage corporatif (EHESS, 1990); Giustizia sommaria. Pratiche e ideali di giustizia in una società di Ancien Régime(Feltrinelli, 2003); Etrangers. Etude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Bayard, 2012); “Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture” (2015); “Sources and Contextualizations: Comparing Eighteenth-Century North African and Western European Institutions” (with I. Grangaud, 2017).

  • 2017-2018

    Spring

    Sara Enrico’s work examines the concept of “weaving” in the material and figurative planes, and as a conceptual process, such as the weaving together of several languages. Using manual and digital processes and the basic materials of painting with industrial and textile materials, she investigates the potentialities of a surface in relation with its own body and context. Shapes that seem to assume postures and certain anthropomorphic traits, as in à terre, en l’air (Tile project space, Milan, 2017), Ghost tracks (Fondazione 107, Turin, 2015) and No music was playing (Les Instants Chavirés, Montreuil, Paris, 2014), or in the new body of works, The Jumpsuit Theme, recently became part of the permanent collection of PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Torino (2017). 

    Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including: Deposito d’Arte Italiana Presente, Artissima, Turin 2017; An Entertainment in Conversation and Verse, Galleria Tiziana di Caro, Naples 2017; Biennale Internazionale Arte in Memoria, Sinagoga, Parco Archeologico di Ostia Antica, Ostia (Rome) 2017; Mirroring, Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan, 2016; 60° Premio Termoli, In Cantiere, MACTE Termoli, 2016; Supernova, MAG, Riva del Garda, 2015; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2014; Galleria d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Turin, 2013; Peep Hole, Milan, 2013.

    Enrico (born in Biella, 1979; lives in Turin) studied at Accademia di Belle Arti in Turin and in Florence at the Istituto Spinelli for a specialization in restoration of ancient paintings and frescoes. In 2013, she attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts with Matt Mullican at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como. She has had residencies at Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’arte in Poirino with Jason Dodge and Raimundas Malasauskas (2015), and, earlier, at VIR-viafarini in residence in Milan (2012). In 2017 she was visiting professor for Polito Design Workshop at the Politecnico di Torino. 

    Enrico is the co-founder of Laboratorio del Dubbio, a cross-disciplinary project composed in 2016 as short-term residency for artists, researchers and writers in Turin. She was a member of Progetto Diogene, a group based in Turin where she ran an international grant program, talks, and workshops on the idea of self-education (from 2008 to 2012).

  • Sapienza Università di Roma

    Expertise, contextual manipulation, and social manipulation: art and conformism

    2017-2018: Spring

    Salvatore Maria Aglioti, MD (University of Pisa), trained as behavioral neurologist (Verona University), is now professor of Social and Organizational Neuroscience at Sapienza University of Rome. He is the head of the laboratories of Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at Sapienza and at Fondazione Santa Lucia, IRCCS, Rome. He is the director of the doctoral school of Psychology and coordinates the International PhD Program in Psychology and Social Neuroscience. His research interests revolve around a variety of social neuroscience topics ranging from embodied empathy for pain and existential neuroscience to deception and dishonesty in social and organizational contexts and to the neural underpinnings of social group coding driven by race as well as by political and religious affiliation. He is heavily involved in dissemination of neuroscience (see for example the scientific essay, Neurofobia: Chi ha paura del cervello?, Aglioti SM, Berlucchi G, Cortina 2013, English version expected in 2018, Oxford University Press).

    Web page: https://agliotilab.org/

  • University College London

    Contesting the Byzantine past: four Hagia Sophias as ideological battlegrounds of architectural conservation in Turkey

    2017-2018: Fall

    Weinberg Fellow in architectural history and preservation

    Pinar Aykac received her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and her MSc in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage from the Middle East Technical University where she worked as a research and teaching assistant. She holds a PhD from UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research discusses how the museum concept expands into the historic city through a musealisation process and transforms the urban form of the Sultanahmet district, which has been the public face of Istanbul’s historic peninsula. She was a conservation team member of the Presidential Ataturk Museum Pavilion Conservation Project, Commagene-Nemrut Conservation and Development Programme, and the Gordion Conservation Management Plan. She also worked as a consultant for conservation projects in Turkey such as Okten and Sabuncuoglu Soap Factories in Antioch and the city of Hasankeyf Surveying, Restitution, Emergency Measures, and Reinforcement Project.

  • Università di Verona

    A new life of Dante Alighieri

    2017-2018: Spring

    Paolo Pellegrini received his Ph.D. in Philology of Italian Literature. He has been a tenured Assistant Professor in Italian philology and linguistics (SSD 10/F-3) at Università di Verona, Department of Cultures and Civilizations, licensed to the role of Full Professor in 2017. He has been a visiting fellow to K.U. Leuven, Catholic University of Pilicsaba (Budapest), Harvard University (Houghton Library), and an invited speaker at Beijing (Normal University), Helsinki (University of Helsinki), New York (Columbia - NYU), Firenze (Società Dantesca), and Padova (Ente Nazionale Francesco Petrarca). He is a member of the Ph.D. board of Philology, Literature, and Linguistic Studies (Università di Verona). Since 2015, he has been a partner of the Scientific board of the International Summer School of Dante Studies (Catholic University ‘S. Cuore’ Milan - Università di Verona). He serves on the editorial board of StEFI (Studi di Erudizione e di Filologia Italiana) and L'Ellisse. He is a member of the S.F.L.I. (Società dei Filologi della Letteratura Italiana), A.S.L.I. (Associazione per la Storia della Lingua Italiana), Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie and AASL (Accademia di Agricoltura, Scienze e Lettere di Verona). His research focuses on medieval latin and old Italian language and literature with special regard to Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. He published essays concerning Dante's life and works: Tra Dante e Boccaccio: il monaco Ilaro 'non è mai esistito', Storie e Linguaggi I (2015), pp. 41-103; Il testo critico della «Monarchia» e le ragioni della filologia. Ancora su «sicut in Paradiso Comedie iam dixi» (I xii 6), "Filologia Italiana" (2015); La Comedìa tra Firenze e il Casentino: lettura del canto XVI dell’Inferno, "L'Alighieri" 47 (2016); Il riso di Aristotele e l'autenticità della Questio de aqua et terra di Dante,"L'Alighieri" 49 (2017); His last book, Dante tra Romagna e Lombardia, 2016, follows Dante's life during the first years of the poet's exile.

     

  • Universität Zürich

    Morphosyntactic change in the brain: capitalizing on language variation in Italo-Romance

    2017-2018: Fall

    Michele Loporcaro is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Zurich. Born in Rome, he studied in Pisa and Vienna and obtained his PhD in linguistics at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1993). He held previous positions at the Universities of Padova and Cosenza, in addition to visiting professorships in several universities in Europe and the USA, and visiting fellowships at Magdalen College Oxford (2012) and Wisseschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2013-14). He is also a fellow of Academia Europaea and received in 2012 the Premio Antonio Feltrinelli from the Accademia dei Lincei for his work in Italian linguistics.

    Web page: http://www.rose.uzh.ch/de/seminar/personen/loporcaro.html;https://uzh.academia.edu/mloporcaro

  • Columbia University

    The neural dynamics behind aesthetic appreciation

    2017-2018: Spring

    Mel joins the academy as a specialist in judgment and decision making who is interested in empirical aesthetics. Mel received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from NYU where he studied how neural mechanisms can explain biases in our everyday decisions. Since then, Mel has conducted similar projects at the Department of Economics at Columbia University studying various aspects of economic decision making. In the arts, Mel is a regular performer with the Big Apple Lindy Hoppers and an avid vernacular jazz dancer. Currently, Mel aims to combine his interests in the arts and sciences with the study of aesthetics. Mel's latest projects will explore how different sequences (e.g., song structure, choreography, etc.) can encourage or suppress aesthetic appreciation. 

     

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Michelangelo and paper as palimpsest

    2017-2018: Fall

    Mauro Mussolin is an architectural and art historian with a Ph.D. from the Università IUAV di Venezia (2001). Over the years, he has taught architectural and art history at New York University Florence - Villa La Pietra (2005-2014), and landscape architecture at the Università per Stranieri in Siena (2008-2010). He has been Research Associate at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2009-2015), visiting professor at Kusthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Plank Institut (2012), and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (2015). He was also fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, 2003-2004), CASVA (The National Gallery of Art in Washington, 2015-2016), The Getty (The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Spring-Summer 2016), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2015-2016).

    He has published on Michelangelo, Italian urban history and the Renaissance built environment with a particular interest in architecture and art as instruments to transform the experience of space, generate new founding myths, produce political meanings, build civic identity, cement collective memory, and display original setting through which new forms of social relationships, both lay and religious, are defined. His interest is also devoted to the material culture from Late Medieval to Modern time, such as drawing conventions and draughtsmanship, paper and papermaking, and the practice of architectural models as instruments of design process.His current book project treats Michelangelo and paper as palimpsest.

    Web page: https://metmuseum.academia.edu/MauroMussolin

  • Stockholms Universitet

    Dreaming with open eyes: the theater of Giovan Francesco Busenello

    2017-2018: Spring

    Theatre scholar Magnus Tessing Schneider specializes in the dramaturgy and performance practices of Italian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera. From 2013 to 2017, he was a full-time research fellow within the large-scale project Performing Premodernity (Stockholm University), which brought together academic and artistic researchers, exploring relations between aesthetics, dramaturgy, and performance practices in eighteenth-century theatre and opera. He is a specialist of the librettists Giovan Francesco Busenello, Ranieri Calzabigi, and Lorenzo Da Ponte and studies their well-known and lesser-known works from a perspective that involves poetic, dramaturgical and musical analysis, musical and scenic performance practices, performance and reception history, and intellectual history. He received his PhD from Aarhus University in 2009 for a thesis on the original production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and has published on the operas of Monteverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Paisiello, and Verdi. He has also published on Shakespeare and has taught dramaturgy and theatre historiography at the University of Copenhagen. In addition to working as a researcher, he was a cofounder of the Nordic Network for Early Opera and directed three operas in Copenhagen: Monteverdi’s Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Cavalli’s Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne.

    Web page: http://www.su.se/ike/english/about-us/contact/employees/staff-at-theatre...

  • 2017-2018: Spring

    Ludovica Carbotta (Torino, 1982) lives and works in Maastricht (NL). Her practice focuses on the physical exploration of the urban space and how individuals establish connections with the environment they inhabit. In recent works, she has combined installation, texts, and performance to research fictional site-specificity, a form of site-oriented practice that considers imaginary places—or embodies real places with fictional contexts—recovering the role of imagination as a value to construct our knowledge. 

    Carbotta completed her MFA at Goldsmiths University in London (2015). Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions including Kunstlerhaus Museum (Graz), MAXXI Museum (Rome), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Hangar Bicocca (Milan), Dublin Contemporary (Dublin), Matadero (Madrid), Swiss Institute (Rome), and Les Instants Chavirés (Paris). Recent solo exhibitions include Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid (2017), ON Public - Monowe, Bologna (2016), A motorway is a very strong wind, Care Of, Milan (2014), Vitrine 270° - Without Walls, Galleria Arte Moderna, Turin (2013), and Greater Torino, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin (2011).

    She is the co-founder of Progetto Diogene, an International Residency Program in the public space (Turin: www.progettodiogene.eu) and The Institute of Things to Come, a research centre on futurological scenarios (www.theinstituteofthingstocome.com). She was awarded the Ariane de Rothschild Prize, Milan (2011), the Premio Gallarate (2016), an International Fellowship at Gasworks, London (2016), and the Special Mention at Premio ITALIA, MAXXI Museum, Rome (2016). She is currently a fellow researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie, in Maastricht (2017-2018).

     

  • Columbia University

    Immanuel of Rome as a translational Jewish writer of medieval Italy

    2017-2018: Spring

    Isabelle Levy is a lecturer at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies/Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She studies the relationships among the Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish literary traditions of the medieval Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on how medieval Jewish literature serves as both a mediator and innovator across these hybrid environs. She is currently researching the cultural, literary and theological implications of the Hebrew and Italian compositions of Immanuel of Rome, a Jewish contemporary of Dante. This work forms part of the book manuscript she is completing titled 'Prose or Verse? Jewish Erotic Literature of the Medieval Mediterranean'. She has articles in A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, Volume II (“Hybridity through Poetry: Sefer ha-meshalim and the Status of Poetry in Medieval Iberia”) and in La corónica (“Romance Literature in Hebrew Language with an Arabic Twist: The First Story of Jacob ben El‘azar’s Sefer ha-meshalim”). Levy completed a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia (2005), after which she conducted research in Spain on the Judeo-Spanish ballad tradition as a Fulbright fellow. She earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard (2014) and has held positions as Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia (2015-2016), Medieval Fellow at Fordham University (2014-2015), and the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia (2016-2017).

  • Sapienza Università di Roma

    The brain circuits for memory: quality versus quantity

    2017-2018: Fall

    Giulia Torromino is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Naples. She recently obtained her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience at Sapienza Università di Roma. Her main research focus is the neurobiology of learning and memory in basal and pathological conditions, and in aging.
    Her doctoral work focused on the mechanisms of memory consolidation, with the goal of understanding how different brain regions interact to stabilize a memory trace. In particular, she studied the role of the communication between two brain structures, the hippocampal formation and the ventral striatum, in the post-learning phase of spatial tasks in rodents. She worked as an intern and researcher at the Champalimaud Center for The Unknown in Lisbon, at the DANDRITE center of Aarhus University, at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Aix-Marseille University and at the Laboratory of Experimental Neurophysiology of Charles University in Pilsen. Her post-doctoral research focuses on the mechanisms of memory capacity and its aging-associated decline.
    Since 2011 she has been working with Numero Cromatico, a research center focusing on the study of the relationship between art and science. In the same year, she co-founded the journal nodes, in which she published her own articles and for which she translated several papers from eminent scientists. 

    Papers in peer-reviewed journal:
    • Sannino S.*, Russo F.*, Torromino G., Pendolino V., Calabresi P., De Leonibus E. Role of the hippocampus in object memory load in mice. Learning and memory 2012, 19(5):211-8.
    Papers on nodes journal
    • Torromino G., Towards a new merger of scientific disciplines and humanities, Nodes 5/6, 2015.
    • Gagliardi D.M. and Torromino G., On the concept of creativity: general creativity and multiple creativity. Nodes 1, 2013.
    • Torromino G., Notes on the development of neuroscience. Nodes 0, 2012.
    • Gagliardi D.M. and Torromino G., Notes on the concept of creativity between method and inspiration. Nodes magazine 0, 2012.

    Translations for nodes journal:
    • Ramachandran V. S. (2011), Neurologia dell’estetica visiva. Ninfe indiane, arte moderna, e becchi attraenti, Nodes 7/8, 2016 [Original Title: Neurology of Visual Aesthetics, Indian Nymphs, Modern Art, and Sexy Beaks; Published on: Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience by Arthur P. Shimamura e Stephen E. Palmer, Oxford University Press, 2011].
    • Zaidel D. (2015), La neuroestetica non riguarda solo l’arte, Nodes 7/8, 2016 [Original Title: Neuroesthetics is not just about art, frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9:1-2)].
    • Changeux J. P. (2012), Bellezza nel cervello: per una neuroscienza dell'arte, Nodes 5/6, 2015 [Original Title: Beauty in the Brain: for a neuroscience of art, Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei (2012), 23:315-320].
    • Zeki S. (2001), La creatività artistica e il cervello, Nodes 2, 2014 [Original Title: Artistic creativity and the Brain, Science (2001), Vol. 293:51-52].

  • Sapienza Università di Roma

    Should I stay or should I go? Neural underpinnings of inhibitory control of voluntary arm movements in pharmacoresistant epileptic patients

    2017-2018: Spring

    Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

    Giovanni Mirabella is assistant professor of physiology at Sapienza University of Rome. He graduated in biology at the University of Trieste, where he also got a PhD in Neuroscience at the International School of Advanced studies. 

    His main interest lies in the neural underpinnings of the genesis of voluntary actions, as he believes they could offer the best experimental model for understanding how ‘free will’ can emerge from brain activity. Following Libet’s original intuition, i.e. free will would not be tied to our ability to select and choose actions but would rely on our ability to suppress them, about 15 years ago he started to study the neural basis of the so-called volitional inhibition. He has designed a reaching version of the stop signal paradigm and has used this paradigm while recording brain activity of monkeys, while causally manipulating the status of subthalamic nuclei by activating or deactivating the deep brain stimulators (DBS) in Parkinson’s patients, and while recording the electrocorticographic activity (ECoG) in pharmacoresistant epileptic patients. From this bulk of studies, he has proposed the intriguing hypothesis that the performance of actions and their suppression are not specified by independent sets of brain regions. Rather, acting and stopping seems to be functions emerging from specific interactions between largely overlapping brain regions, whose activity is intimately linked (directly or indirectly) to the evaluations of pros and cons of an action. 

    He has also studied the relationship between action language and language understanding in the frame of the embodied theory of language, suggesting that motor cortices are involved to some extent in language understanding. 

    As a fellow of the Italian Academy he will try to develop the above mentioned working hypotheses. 

    He has extensive experience in designing and executing behavioral studies both in healthy and unhealthy people (such as patients with Parkinson's disease, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and primary motor stereotypies), and in recording electrophysiological signals from the brain (multielectrode and intracerebral electroencephalographic activity). He is currently serving as Associate Editor of Frontiers in Neural Technology and of Parkinson’s Disease.

  • Università degli Studi del Molise

    The body and the individual: on the conception of modern art in Hegel’s Aesthetics

    2017-2018: Fall

    Giovanna Pinna is an Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the Università del Molise (Campobasso, Italy), where she has also been teaching German Literature since 2005. She studied philosophy at the University of Pisa and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore. As a Ph.D. student, she obtained scholarships at the University of Munich and the Hegel-Archiv of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and was a Thyssen research fellow at the University of Munich. She received a two-year post-doctoral appointment at the Università Statale di Milano (1994-1996), and from 1997 to 2005 she served as a lecturer through associate professor of German studies at the Università della Calabria.

    Her main research interests center on literary and philosophical aesthetics, with special reference to 18th-19th century German culture. She has published extensively on authors such as G.W.F. Hegel, F.W.J. Schelling, F. Schiller, F. Schlegel, K.W.F. Solger, L. Tieck. Over the last few years, she has developed a further strand of research focusing on philosophy of ageing and humanistic gerontology. In 2013-2014 she spent a sabbatical year at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin as an invited scholar, working on a project on “Aging and the Experience of Time”. She has just finished a commented edition of K.W.F. Solger’s Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, forthcoming in the series “Philosophische Bibliothek”, Meiner Verlag, Hamburg.

    Publications:  https://unimol.academia.edu/giovannaPinna

  • University of Toronto

    The network of Cassinese arts in Mediterranean Renaissance Italy (ca. 1450-1600)

    2017-2018: Spring

    Giancarla Periti (BA, Università degli Studi di Genova, 1992; PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, 2003) is an Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance art at the University of Toronto. Periti’s publications have explored the dense intersections between images and texts, vision and conventual spaces, framing devices and pictures. Her research interests revolve around the arts of the Mediterranean Renaissance “periphery” and the dialogue between the sister arts in liminal zones. She is the author of In the Courts of Religious LadiesArt, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents (Yale University Press 2016) and, most recently, of a forthcoming co-edited volume, entitled Ravenna in the Imagination of Renaissance Art (Brepols). Periti is currently at work on a book project that maps the management of late antique art and architecture over time.

  • Università di Roma 3

    The return of the owl: Athenian democracy in the European Renaissance (1260-1564)

    2017-2018: Spring

    Gabriele Pedullà is associate professor of Italian Literature at the University of Roma Tre and and has been visiting professor at Stanford, UCLA, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Lyon), and Francesco De Dombrowski Fellow at “Villa I Tatti,” the Harvard University Center for the Italian Renaissance. His research focuses on Renaissance political thought and contemporary fiction. He has published La strada più lunga: Sulle tracce di Beppe Fenoglio (Donzelli, 2001), In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema(Verso, 2012; original Italian version: Bompiani, 2008), and Machiavelli in tumulto: Conquista, cittadinanza e conflitto nei "Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio" (Bulzoni, 2011: forthcoming in English for Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as a new commentary to Machiavelli’s Prince (Donzelli, 2013: forthcoming in English for Verso, 2019). As a fiction writer he has published two prizewinning books: the collection of short stories Lo spagnolo senza sforzo (Einaudi, 2009) and the novel Lame (Einaudi, 2017). With Sergio Luzzatto he edited a three-volume Atlante della letteratura italiana (Einaudi, 2010-12).

  • Università IUAV di Venezia

    “Verona, the second Rome”: defining a local identity in the Renaissance Veneto

    2017-2018: Fall

    Weinberg Fellow in architectural history and preservation

    Francesco Marcorin holds a PhD in Architectural History from the IUAV University of Venice (2014). His research activity merges architectural/art history and archaeology and provides an alternative reading of the development of the Renaissance architectural language, analyzing the strong influence exerted by non-Vitruvian models such as local antiquities, Late-Antique monuments and Medieval buildings. More specifically, the 16th Century re-discovery of Late-Antique architecture and the definition of new models – exogenous to the Classical language – have been analyzed in detail in several articles and conference papers, with a specific focus on early-modern Rome and Venice and architects of the likes of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Andrea Palladio and Michele Sanmicheli.

    After completing his PhD, Francesco has conducted archival and curatorial activities: in 2014-15 he cooperated with the State Archives of Verona for the full inventory of the Bevilacqua family archive; in 2016 he worked at the Palladio Museum in Vicenza as assistant curator for the exhibition "Andrea Palladio. Il mistero del volto" (The mystery of Palladio’s face) and in 2017 with The Frick Collection in New York as Ayesha Bulchandani Curatorial Intern.

    Web page: https://iuav.academia.edu/FMarcorin

  • Università di Bologna

    Pathos formulas and abstraction in Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s and Giambattista Basile’s fairy tales

    2017-2018: Spring

    Ezio Puglia received his Ph.D. in Italian Studies at the University of Bologna in 2012 with a comparative study about the image of things in 19th and 20th Century literary fantastic. He recently completed a post-doc at the University of Luxembourg (AFR Marie-Curie Post-Doctoral Research Grant). His project investigated, on the one hand, the so-called dematerialization process through concrete configurations of objects and spaces, and, on the other, the numerous references to a fantastic or magic dimension of reality appearing in contemporary philosophical analyses of hyper-industrial societies.

    His research relates mostly to fantastic literature, imagination, literary theory, thing theory, spectrality, and philosophical archaeology. 

    At the Italian Academy, he will inquire into the first specimens of written fairy tales. In particular, considering the genre as an inestimable heritage of pathos formulas and “verbal gestures” (Jolles), he will focus on the contrast between abstraction and empathy in fairy tales’ expression of emotions, as well as on the relationship between the popularity of fairy tales and the renewal of ancient beliefs in Italian Renaissance and Baroque.

  • Cardiff University

    Re-thinking early prehistoric art as a cognitive technology: neuroscientific, anthropological, and techno-functional perspectives

    2017-2018: Fall and Spring

    Dušan Borić received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. He is an anthropological archaeologist interested in dynamics of culture change and cultural transmission processes. His primary foci have been foraging and the first farming societies in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. He has written about various aspects of mortuary and corporeal symbolism, social memory, and household archaeology in prehistoric periods. He is also interested in the integration of science-based methodologies and archaeological interpretation, primarily in relation to palaeodietary studies and radiocarbon dating in conjunction with Bayesian statistical modeling.

    At the Italian Academy in the Fall and Spring semesters, his research will focus on the rethinking of prehistoric art by drawing on a range of neuroscientific, anthropological, and techno-functional perspectives. A particular focus will be on the interdependence of diverse modes of depiction in prehistoric contexts and different ontological schemes of practice.

    His published volumes include Archaeology and Memory (2010) and Past Bodies: Body-Centred Research in Archaeology (2008), the latter co-edited with John Robb. His most recent monograph, Deathways at Lepenski Vir: Patterns in Mortuary Practice (2016), explores the role of mortuary data in reconstructing diverse practice-based rituals and perceptions of the living and dead body throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic use of this iconic site of European Prehistory. Methodologically, the book provides a comprehensive case for the necessity of integrating archaeological and bioarchaeological data. He has conducted archaeological field work at a number of Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic sites in Serbia and Montenegro, and participated in research projects in Italy, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, and Brazil.

    Web page: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/73002-bori-duan

    See also Dušan Borić as NOMIS Foundation Fellow.

  • Columbia University

    Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens and playful humanism

    2017-2018: Fall and Spring

    Donna Bilak is an historian of early modern science, specializing in material culture: her research encompasses the history of alchemy in British North America, England, and the Continent; the study of emblematics; and jewelry history and craft technology. From 2014-17, Bilak was a Postdoctoral Scholar on The Making & Knowing Project at Columbia University, directed by Pamela H. Smith. Bilak's current research project is centered on the Atalanta fugiens, an alchemical emblem book set to music written in 1617/18 by Michael Maier, a German physician and alchemist — this research began during her 2013-14 postdoctoral fellowship at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia. Maier's virtuoso program blends music, images, poetry, cabala, and science into a paean to wisdom achieved through alchemical arts, and Bilak's analysis of this enigmatic work forms the premise of her book project, undertaken this year as an Italian Academy Fellow, 'Catch Me If You Can': Ludic Humanism and Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618). 

    Web page: www.dbilakpraxis.com

  • Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

    The cultural roots of landscape protection in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States (19th–20th centuries)

    2017-2018: Spring

    Weinberg Fellow in architectural history and preservation

    After the Ph.D. in History of Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the collaboration with Monumenta Rariora Project, Denise La Monica has devoted her interests to the protection of cultural heritage, working as research team and project coordinator in the Laboratorio per la Ricerca, Analisi, Tutela, Tecnologie ed Economia per il patrimonio culturale at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She has developed research projects on different topics, such as the organization of local museums in net systems, the historical development of cultural heritage protection, the underwater cultural heritage, and the abandon and reuse of historical buildings considered as public assets. Over the years, she has published articles not only in scientific journals, but also in newspapers, addressed to a wider public. Among her recent publications: I mascheroni in bronzo del Tacca: dalla Fortezza Vecchia al Museo Civico di Livorno; Un dibattito inedito, Annali di Critica d’Arte, 11/2016, 477-496; I Quattro Mori: un monumento caro alla popolazione e ammirato dai forestieri, I territori del patrimonio, ed. R. Balzani, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2015, 95-133.

    She is a founder and an active member of Patrimoniosos (http://www.patrimoniosos.it)

  • Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

    Michelangelo and allography: expanded authorship in Renaissance artwork

    2017-2018: Fall

    Dario Donetti holds a PhD in Art History from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2016). He previously studied in Paris and Florence, where he earned an MA (2008) in Architectural History from the Università degli Studi di Firenze. He has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. He is also a collaborator with the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi (Euploos project, 2012-present).

    He has co-organized exhibitions and conferences, ranging from Early Modern topics to contemporary theoretical debates, and he is the author of many publications devoted to Tuscan Renaissance and Italian architecture of the twentieth century. As a member of the “Rinascimento conteso” research group, he is currently a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

    Web page: https://www.khi.fi.it/person/38726/4842738

  • Accademia di architettura – Università della Svizzera Italiana

    The Karlsruhe albums and their significance for Piranesi studies

    2017-2018: Spring

    Weinberg Fellow in architectural history and preservation

    Christoph Frank (Basel, 1963) is a historian of the classical tradition who specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European art and architecture with an occasional overlapping interest in twentieth-century art and politics, particularly in relation to issues of cultural looting and genocide. He studied the History of Western Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where he received his B.A. (1986) and M.A. (1987) before continuing his studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and at the Warburg Institute in London where he completed his Ph.D. in 1993 in the History of the Classical Tradition with a thesis entitled "The Mechanics of Triumph: Public Ceremony and Civic Pageantry under Louis XIV". Following German Unification, he worked at the Research Center for European Enlightenment Studies in Berlin/Potsdam and from 1999 until 2003 at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome. In 2005, he was nominated full professor of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture at the Accademia di architettura of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Mendrisio, where in 2011 he founded the Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura. He has recently written on the Roman agent Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein (1719-93), on the artistic correspondences of Margravine Karoline Luise von Baden (1723-83) and the rediscovery of Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s "L’Amitié au coeur" of 1765, stolen from the Rothschilds during WWII. Furthermore he was closely involved in the recent identification of two albums of drawings, preserved at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, and now attributed to the Roman artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) and other members of his workshop, which will be the subject of Professor Frank’s fellowship at the Italian Academy. 

    Web page: http://www.isa.arc.usi.ch

  • Universitat Pompeu Fabra

    The topology of mental states: combining big data science and graph theory to reveal neural networks for cognitive functions

    2017-2018: Fall

    After studying Philosophy and Cognitive Science in Naples, Mainz (bachelor), and Rome (master), Andrea obtained his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain). His PhD work focused on brain processes involved in decision confidence computation, using biophysical modeling and statistical analysis of neurophysiological data. Currently he is working at the Center for Brain and Cognition of the University Pompeu Fabra as a postdoctoral researcher. He is interested in applying mathematical modeling, machine learning and graph theory to explain the brain functions and dis-functions. To this aim, Andrea take a global approach, studying the brain as a whole in order to understand how different parts of the brain interact. In particular, he is interested in unraveling the networks underlying different mental states, brain disorders, and cognitive tasks.

    Web page: http://gustavodecolab.com/member/?smid=197

  • Duke University

    Mimesis, transmission, power: archaeology of the Roman provinces

    2017-2018: Fall

    Alicia's research engages with archaeological theory and Roman visual and material culture, specifically in the western and central Mediterranean in the period 218 BCE-200 CE. During her junior sabbatical at Duke University, she will work on her new book project at the Italian Academy (Columbia University, New York, Fall Semester 2017) and the ANHIMA Research Center (UMR 8210, Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques, Paris, Spring Semester 2018). The book investigates the relationship between mimesis, colonialism and material culture to better understand how shapes, images and objects are transmitted and replicated in (post)colonial contexts, using as a primary case study archaeological remains from the province of Hispania (modern Spain and Portugal). An archaeological theory of mimesis has the potential to offer new insights into why and how the Roman provinces resembled the metropolis (or not) during the early phases of the expansion of the Roman empire over the Mediterranean (2nd c. BCE – 1st c. CE) and the part played by seemingly homogenous material culture in imperialism.

    Her first monograph, Imagines hibridae. A postcolonial approach to the study of the Baetican necropolis (2008, published in Spanish), analyzed the impact of Roman colonization in the funerary rituals of southern Spain and how different discourses about collective ancestry were simultaneously mediated in the forum and the tomb. Alicia has carried out archaeological fieldwork at various Iron Age, Hellenistic and Roman sites in the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. She co-directs the excavations at the Roman camps near Numantia (Renieblas, Spain, 2nd-1st c. BCE) since 2015. 

    Web page: www.classicalstudies.duke.edu/people/alicia-jimenez