2022: Spring
Painting, Drawing & Video, Sculpture
Ruth Beraha (Milan, 1986). Beraha’s research investigates elements that can commonly be labeled, evil, strange, or unknown, focusing on the disruption of the certainties on which we base our experience of the world. With immersive audios, sculptures, installations, drawings and photographs, her work makes the viewer consider the Adversary no longer as a distant and incomprehensible entity, but as a constitutive part of our identity.
Her most recent shows include: My Blueberry Night II, curated by Antonio Grulli, Piazza del Duomo, Bergamo (2019); Dad Jokes, Ncontemporary gallery, Milan (2019); Non sarai mai solo, solo show curated by Paola Tognon, Museo della Città, Livorno (2019); MONO 2, solo show curated by Gabriele Tosi and Fabio Farnè, LocaleDue, Bologna (2018); Arte in memoria 10, Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ostia Antica archeological site, Rome (2018); That’s it, curated by Lorenzo Balbi, MAMbo, Bologna (2018); Pensiero stupendo (self-portrait), solo show curated by Stefano Coletto, Museo Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2018); Take Me (I’m Yours), curated by Christian Boltanski, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Chiara Parisi, Roberta Tenconi, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017).
Russell Sage Foundation (New York, U.S.A)
Daniel Fignolé: Black/Italian exiles, the word and the world
2019-2020: Fall
Rich Benjamin is a scholar researching democracy and citizenship; whiteness and nationalism; race and migration; and demographic change, often in comparative “western” contexts. He is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, selected as an Editor’s Choice by Booklist and The American Library Association. This groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the rise of white anxiety and white nationalism in contemporary public US life.
Benjamin’s cultural and political analysis appear regularly in public debate, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, and National Public Radio (NPR). His scholarly research has received support from Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Brown University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Benjamin was recently a Fellow in the literary arts at the Bellagio Center (Italia), Rockefeller Foundation. Benjamin received his BA from Wesleyan University in Government and Literature and his PhD from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.
Web page: http://richbenjamin.com/
Bilkent Üniversitesi (Ankara, Turkey)
The Ottoman diaspora in Renaissance Tuscany
2019-2020: Fall and Spring
F. Özden Mercan received her master’s degrees from the Department of History at Bilkent University (Ankara) and from the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (Budapest). She earned a PhD in History from the European University Institute (Florence) in 2017. She has held positions as Instructor in History at Bilkent University (2016-2018) and Tübitak Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the European University Institute (2018-2019). Her research examines the history of Eastern Mediterranean in the late medieval and early modern periods, with specific emphasis on diplomatic, political, cultural and economic interactions between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. She has published on European communities and émigrés in Turkey, on the diplomatic relations of the Italian states, particularly the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Republic of Genoa with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, and on practices of coexistence and constructions of the other in the early modern period.
Among her publications are “The Genoese of Pera in the Fifteenth Century: Draperio and Spinola Families” in Living in the Ottoman Realm: Sultans, Subjects and Elites eds. Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent F. Schull, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016) pp. 42-54; “Medici-Ottoman Diplomatic Relations (1574-1578): What Went Wrong?” in The Grand Ducal Medici and the Levant: Material Cultural, Diplomacy, and Imagery in the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. Marta Caroscio and Maurizio Arfaioli, (Turnhout: Brepols / Harvey Miller Publishing, 2016) pp. 19-31; “Constructing a Self-Image in the Image of the Other: Pope Pius II’s Letter to Sultan Mehmed II” in Practices of Coexistence. Constructions of the Other in Early Modern Perceptions, eds. Marianna D. Birnbaum and Marcell Sebók, (Budapest–New York: CEU Press, 2017) pp. 71-102; “A Struggle for Survival: Genoese Diplomacy with the Sublime Porte in the Face of Spanish and French Opposition,” Journal of Early Modern History vol. 24, issue 3 (forthcoming).
Web page: https://eui.academia.edu/FOzdenMercan
German Historical Institute London
People inside ruins: heritage, photography, and counter-archives
2019-2020: Fall
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Dr. Mirjam Brusius is a historian of material and visual culture with a strong interest in the history of photography, museums, collecting, archaeology and heritage. Looking at the cross-cultural circulation of objects and images between Europe and the Middle East, her current research projects embrace two interrelated themes: First, she examines how artifacts from the Islamicate world were appropriated in museums of the ‘Western world’. The second project concerns how photography was applied in the Islamicate world. Mirjam participates in relevant meetings and takes part as a panelist, commentator, and keynote speaker in public debates on colonial legacies and collecting. She holds an MA in Art History, Cultural Studies and Musicology (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2007) and a doctorate in History and Philosophy of Science (University of Cambridge 2011). She is currently a Research Fellow in Colonial and Global History at the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), which she joined in 2017, having held fellowships at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Web page: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/staff/brusius.html
Consorzio FINO (Filosofia del Nord Ovest; Italy)
Aesthetic experience and sensory imagination
2019-2020: Fall
Marta Benenti received her PhD in Philosophy in 2018 from the FINO Consortium (Universities of Turin, Eastern Piedmont, Genoa and Pavia). During her PhD she has been a visiting student at the philosophy departments of Glasgow, Bochum and Antwerp and was awarded a DAAD fellowship at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (2018) for a research project on infants' discriminatory capacities of affective cues. She is now a teaching assistant at the University of Eastern Piedmont and is currently working on the publication of her thesis.
Her areas of interest are philosophy of the mind and aesthetics, and she is particularly interested in the interplay between perception, emotions and imagination in the experience of expressive qualities.
During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will investigate the role of "sensory imagination" in the experience of artworks, working at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive sciences. She will test philosophical accounts of gestural, affective and metaphorical properties against psychological evidence and the historical and critical background of selected artworks.
Web page: https://unito.academia.edu/MartaBenenti
Università di Milano – Bicocca (Italy)
What the people want: an analysis of the populist trend in Italy
2019-2020: Spring
Alexander Bodini Fellow in Transitions from Globalism to Nationalism and Populism
Marina Calloni has since 2002 been a full professor in social and political philosophy at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan. She is deputy president of the Italian Society of Political Philosophy (SIFP) and delegate of the Rector for International Cooperation. She is director of the departmental research center "PRAGSIA" concerning issues of public concerns and of the center ADV - Against Domestic Violence with the related master on "Violence against women and children”. In 2020 she will be the Alexander Bodini Fellow in Transitions from Globalism to Nationalism and Populism at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York.
She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Pavia) and a Ph.D. in Social and Political Science (European University Institute in Florence). She was a research fellow at the University of Frankfurt under J. Habermas and a senior researcher and director of the International Network on Research on Gender at the London School of Economics. She was a visiting professor at the Universities of Bremen, Vienna, Lugano, Kurume. She earned a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Notre Dame (USA). She has lectured and given presentations in many cities and countries. She was a component of the Inter-ministerial Committee for Human Rights at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome and a member of the management board of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.
She is a member of various national and international boards of journals and has participated/is participating in several national and international research projects and cross-border networks, collaborating with universities, research centers, NGOs and supranational institutions. In particular, she has collaborated with many international institutions including the European Commission, UNESCO, UNDP, and UNHCR. She is now working with the Council of Europe for a project she directs on the application of the Istanbul Convention.
Areas of Interest include: social and political philosophy; democracy, citizenship and representation; conflicts and humanitarianism; human rights and fundamental freedoms; critical theory of society; gender issues; critique of violence; international research networks and cross-border co-operation.Recent publications include: Women, Minorities, Populism in: A. Vajpeyi, V. Kaul (eds.), Minorities and Populism. Comparative Perspectives from India and Europe, London: Springer, 2019; Southern Europe: Gender Studies and Institutions in the Euro-Mediterranean Region in B. Kortendiek, B. Riegraf, K. Sabisch (eds.), Handbuch Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung, Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019, vol. 2, pp. 1547-1558; Intersectionality and Women’s Human Rights: From Social Criticism to the Creation of Capabilities in: E. H. Oleksy, A. M. Różalska and M. M. Wojtaszek (eds.), The Personal of the Political: Transgenerational Dialogues in Contemporary European Feminisms, Newcastel-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 65-85; Libertà individuale, giustizia sociale e lotta contro ogni oppressione. Il socialismo liberale di Carlo Rosselli in: Politica & Società, 2018, n. 3, pp. 319-352; Images of fear in political philosophy and fairy tales: Linking private abuse to political violence in human rights discourse in: Journal of International Political Theory, 2016, vol. 12, n. 1, pp. 67–89.
Università di Trento (Italy)
Efficient teaching practices and the neuroscience of learning
2019-2020: Spring
Manuela Piazza is currently associate professor at the Center for mind/brain sciences (CIMeC) at the University of Trento, Italy. She earned her PhD from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience of the University College, in London, UK, and has been a researcher at the French institute for medical research (INSERM), in Paris, France. As a cognitive neuroscientist she combines psychophysics and functional imaging techniques (fMRI, MEG) to the study of how the human brain supports cultural acquisitions. She importantly contributed in unveiling the neurocognitive underpinnings of basic mathematics, including number sense and mental arithmetic, and of word semantics. During her stay at the Academy she will focus on establishing links between the neurobiology of learning and the science of teaching.
Web page: https://r.unitn.it/en/cimec/per2con
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (Victoria, Australia)
Images of destruction, destruction of images: a political iconology of iconoclasm in the 21st century
2019-2020: Spring
José Antonio González Zarandona is affiliated with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University (Australia) and División de Historia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Mexico). He specializes in the destruction of art, heritage and material culture, and the interdisciplinary frameworks that explain this phenomena. In 2014, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Melbourne (Australia) on the destruction of Indigenous rock art in Western Australia. He has been awarded fellowships at the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage (University of Birmingham, 2015), the University of Oxford (funded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2016) and Forensic Architecture (Goldsmiths University, funded by the British Academy, 2018).
CUNY: Queens College & the Graduate Center (U.S.A.)
What is left on the Brazilian periphery? Populism, critique, and the lives of democracy after Lula
2019-2020: Spring
John Collins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is Co-Chair of the Columbia University Brazil Seminar and from 2011 to 2017 he directed the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Queens College. John holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale College. He has been a Fulbright Fellow in Brazil (1997-98), a member of the CUNY Advanced Research Cooperative (2019) and a Mellon Fellow at both the CUNY Graduate Center Committee on Globalization and Social Change (2014-15) and the CUNY Center for the Humanities (2004-05 & 2010-11). His field research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the U.S. National Park Service, and the Brazilian PIBIC Program.
In addition to numerous articles, Collins is the author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy, which earned the 2016 Anthony Leeds Prize for Urban Ethnography (Duke University Press, 2015), translator and editor of Sharing this Walk: An Ethnography of Prison Life and the PCC in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), and co-editor of Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (Duke University Press, 2018). He serves on the boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
John works mainly on issues of ethnographic history, semiotics, cultural heritage politics, and human-animal relations. At the Italian Academy he will be writing a new book on Afro-Brazilian women’s politics and the relationships between the Left-leaning governments of Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva and Brazil’s current right wing, authoritarian national government.
Web page: https://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/anthro/Web_Pages/collins/John%20Collins,%20Q...
University of Oxford (U.K.)
Religious heritage and monetization: the problem of simony in medieval Italy, c. 1050–1130
2019-2020: Fall and Spring
James Norrie is a historian of early medieval Italy and the Mediterranean. His interests lie especially in how urban change remakes both material worlds and religion, stories he follows in trying to understand the transformation of the post-Roman world and the growth of citied societies in the eleventh century. His doctorate, completed at the University of Oxford in 2017, studied how the growth of Milan in the long eleventh century transformed social landscapes and exchange, sparking religious revolt on a scale then unprecedented in medieval Europe. He is now finishing a book under the title Urban Change and Radical Religion: Medieval Milan, c.990-1140, to be published with Oxford University Press.
Following studies at Oxford and University College London, Norrie has taught at Oxford and held doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships in London, at the British School at Rome, and at the University of Padua, with support from bodies including the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Wolfson Foundation. He has also written on the comparative history of urban ritual and processions, debt, and on the risks of city life in the long period from the end of the Roman empire to the twelfth century. At the Italian Academy he will work on why monetisation provoked unprecedented anxieties about the legitimacy of religious authority in eleventh-century Italy, remaking the imagined network of relations between humans, things, and divinity.
Radboud Universiteit (Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
Cardano’s dream interpretation in Renaissance medicine and natural philosophy
2019-2020: Fall
Hiro Hirai, Ph.D. (1999) in philosophy and history of science, University of Lille 3 (France), is a Research Fellow at Radboud University (Netherlands). He has published widely in early modern natural philosophy, medicine and alchemy, including Le concept de semences dans les théories de la Renaissance (2005) and Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy (2011). He also edited Justus Lipsius and Natural Philosophy (2011) and Jacques Gaffarel Between Magic and Science (2014). He is currently preparing his third monograph on Renaissance science and medicine.
Web page: http://radboud.academia.edu/HiroHirai
Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Italy)
Seismic assessment of cultural heritage: safety and conservation
2019-2020: Spring
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Gianmarco de Felice is professor of structural engineering at the Department of Engineering of Roma Tre University, where he teaches the courses of Earthquake Engineering and Rehabilitation of Structures. He graduated in 1990 at the University La Sapienza in Rome and received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Florence. He was research associate at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris in 1994-95, researcher at the Faculty of Architecture of Roma Tre University from 1996 to 2001, associate professor at the Faculty of Engineering, and then full professor since 2011.
He is head of the PhD School in Civil Engineering at Roma Tre University, chairman of the RILEM Technical Committee TC-250 CSM Composites for the Sustainable Strengthening of Masonry from 2013 and chairman of the ACI 549-0L Liaison Committee on Thin Reinforced Cementitious Products and Ferrocement from 2016. He is associate editor of Frontiers in Structural Materials and Advances in Civil Engineering, member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Architectural Heritage, member of the drafting committee of the Charter of Rome on the Resilience of Art Cities to Natural Catastrophes. He is also one of the founders and professor of the summer school on Historic Masonry Structures.
His current research activity encompasses the structural analysis of cultural heritage; the seismic assessment of historic structures, including soil-structure interaction; the retrofitting of monuments and architectural heritage; and the development of innovative strengthening systems through the use of composite materials. He has been invited to give general lectures to several Conferences such as: 8th SAHC, Wrozlaw 2012; 15th MASE , Struga 2013; MuRiCo4, Bologna 2014; Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 2015; 10th SAHC, Leuven 2016, BASA, Sofia 2016; Festival della Scienza, Genova 2017; MuRiCo5, Bologna 2017; 6th ISCCHS, Trabzon 2017; CIRea2018, Lisbon 2018; MuRiCo6, Bologna 2019.
In recent years he has been visiting professor at UC Miami in March 2017, at INSA Toulouse in October 2017, and at École Doctorale Paris Est in January-February 2019. He has been the scientific coordinator for the design of several engineering projects on heritage conservation and structural rehabilitation, such as the restoration of the Abbey of San Clemente in Casauria, supported by the World Monuments Fund and awarded by the 2016 Domus International Award for Restoration and Conservation, and the restoration of the Farnese Palace in Ischia di Castro, attributed to Antonio da Sangallo, and awarded by the Sisto Mastrodicasa 2017 Prize.
Web page: http://www.uniroma3.it/persone/QUNJdXkvcExDWklFaTIzd3BSZWpZUVJPUkJyNGVMM...
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (Italy)
Clasts and chronotopes of disasters: elements for an eco-art history of Italian urban and landscape heritage
2019-2020: Spring
Istituto Abruzzese di Storia Musicale (Italy)
The founding of Italian opera in New York: Lorenzo Da Ponte and L’Ape musicale in context
2019-2020: Fall
Francesco Zimei is a scholar with a strong interest in the study of historical context and mentality from an interdisciplinary perspective. His research has significantly contributed to increase the knowledge of important repertoires from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, such as Italian lauda and Ars Nova, relationships between opera and Commedia dell’Arte, and the orchestral output of Johann Sebastian Bach. Most of these studies have resulted in over sixty scholarly publications among books, peer-review articles and essays. Founder in 1997 of Istituto Abruzzese di Storia Musicale (www.iasm.it) as well as its chairman in the first fifteen years of its activity, he has also been vice chairman of Centro Studi sull’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento (Certaldo) and research fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, and at the University of Ferrara. He is the editor of two scholarly series: Civitatis aures. Musica e contesto Urbano, and Venite a laudare. Studi e facsimili sulla lauda italiana, both published by LIM.
Universität Zürich (Switzerland)
Syntactic transfer in the Italian spoken in New York City
2019-2020: Fall
I am a linguist specializing in language contact. My main research focus is on Italian. I studied Germanic, Romance, and General Linguistics at the universities of Venice, Münster, and Vienna (PhD 2009) and obtained a habilitation in Italian and General Linguistics at the University of Zurich (2019). I held research and teaching positions in Vienna, Graz, and Zurich and taught courses at four international summer schools. I am the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance Linguistics, published by Oxford University Press.
Web page: https://francescogardani.wordpress.com/
Delta State University (Abraka, Nigeria)
Representations of madness and other nervous conditions in female characters in African literature
2019-2020: Fall
Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega is the chair of the English and Literary Studies Department, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria. She has a Ph.D. in Literature-in-English with a speciality in African literature, an area where she has also published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals at home and abroad. During her undergraduate and through her graduate studies her long essays focused on women's writings and/or the presentation of female characters in African literature. Specifically, her doctoral thesis which examined the portrayal of women as victims and agency in Nigerian civil war novels also partially dwelt on the trauma women suffer during a period of conflict. She is very much interested in gender studies where exploring the condition of women has formed the backdrop to some of her scholarly writings and continues to inspire further academic interrogations.
The University of Chicago (U.S.A.)
How the mind deals with knowledge and truth: interdisciplinary perspectives
2019-2020: Spring
Dario Maestripieri is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at The University of Chicago. Dr. Maestripieri is a behavioral scientist interested in understanding human behavior and the human mind from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. Dr. Maestripieri is also interested in exploring and integrating the relative contributions of scientific and humanistic disciplines to the generation and transmission of new knowledge about human behavior and the human mind. Dr. Maestripieri was awarded the 'B. Grassi' prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. He has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and Fellow of the Midwestern Psychological Association. Dr. Maestripieri has published 7 books and 235 articles and book chapters in the behavioral sciences.
Web page: http://primate.uchicago.edu/dario-maestripieri.html
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Munich, Germany)
Majestic shadow of the past: documentation and narrative photography of Hadrian’s Villa and Tivoli (1850–1930)
2019-2020: Spring
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
I completed my PhD in the History of Art in Freiburg im Breisgau, with a Dissertation on Baroque Sculpture in Cardinal’s Tombs (1650-1750). During that time, I was a DAAD Fellow, a Doctoral Fellow at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, and a Doctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. In the last position, I served as research and executive assistant to the director between 2001 and 2014, where I worked on the conception and realization of conferences and subsequent publications. In 2010 I was awarded the Hanno und Ilse Hahn Prize for my research devoted to the architectural drawings by Filippo Juvarra and the elaboration of the antique in his ‘capricci’. My scientific collaborations include projects such as “Architettura e Potere. Lo Stato Sabaudo e la costruzione dell’immagine in una corte europea” (Rome/Turin 2009-2014 with E. Kieven); “Heinrich von Brühl (1700–1763): ein Mäzen in Europa des 18. Jahrhunderts” (Dresden/Rome 2014-2017 with U.C. Koch); “Phönix aus der Asche. Bildwerdung der Antike: Druckgrafiken bis 1869“ (Munich 2019 with U. Pfisterer). My last DFG-Research Project at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich “Hadrian’s Villa as a Microcosm. A Space of Artistic Interaction in 18th- and 19th-Century Europe” focused on the significance of the imperial site as a “globalizing area”, “dynamic contact zone”, and “space of artistic interaction”. As a fellow at the Italian Academy in 2020, I will investigate the impact of photography on the reception of the Roman Campagna and the survival of its ancient historical sites, with a particular attention on Tivoli and Hadrian’s Villa as a privileged and ideal point of departure. This project traces the pivotal paradigmatic relationship of photography to both the precise records of antiquities – from excavations, through to preservation and restoration (documentation) – and in chronicling the undertakings of passionate and erudite travelers (narrative).
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (Italy)
Perceiving law: early modern normativity and the senses
2019-2020: Spring
Fellow for the Academy project “Law and its Manifestations”
Carolin Behrmann is an art historian focusing on political and legal visualities in early modern culture. She is directing the research project The Nomos of Images at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institute that investigates in multiple normative dimensions to understand how visuality and aesthetic experience actively take part in and shape juridical normativity, involving form, perception, action, and knowledge.
She has worked as a scientific collaborator at the Department for Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2005-2011), has been a pre-doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2008-2009), and a post-doctoral researcher at the KHI in Florence (2011-2014). In 2011 she completed her PhD Tyrant and Martyr. Images and the History of Ideas of the Law around 1600 (DeGruyter 2015) that explores the significance of the imagery of martyrdom in the context of the consolidation of statehood, law, and early globalization.
At the Academy she will be working on a book project addressing multiple aspects of a visual common sense and visual literacy with a focus on the 17th-18th century, that ultimately aims to address current debates around a “common sense” of visual literacy in the digital age.
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (Italy)
Preserving a difficult heritage: the afterlife of Fascist monumental art in contemporary Italy
2019-2020: Spring
Carmen Belmonte is a post-doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Udine with a dissertation on colonial visual culture in nineteenth-century Italy (2017). During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Florence (2016) and a Ph.D. candidate in the Swiss Doctoral Program in Civiltà Italiana at the University of Lugano (2013-2016). She studied at the University of Calabria (B.A. 2004, M.A. 2007) and at the University of Pisa, where she obtained the Diploma di Specializzazione in Art History (2011). At the LARTTE LAB of the Scuola Normale Superiore she was a research fellow within the project Osservatorio delle politiche per il patrimonio culturale (2009-2011). At the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz she was assistant to the director (2012-2015) and together with Gerhard Wolf and Elisabetta Scirocco co-developed the project Storia dell’arte e catastrofi (I): L’Italia sismica. In 2017, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut for Art History and in 2019 has been an Italian Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She organized the conference A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlife of Fascist-Era Architecture, Monuments, and Works of Art in Italy (11-12 March 2019, Bibliotheca Hertziana, American Academy in Rome).
Web page: https://www.khi.fi.it/it/institut/mitarbeiter/belmonte-carmen.php
MT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy)
The role of the cerebellum in learning new visuomotor association tasks
2019-2020: Fall
Anna Ipata earned her medical degree with a specialization in Child Neurology and Psychiatry from the School of Medicine of the University of Pisa, Italy. She got her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Verona, Italy and completed post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Michael Goldberg at the National Institutes of Health. She worked as a research scientist in Michael Goldberg's laboratory in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York. She is currently a visiting fellow at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy.
During her residency, Anna Ipata conducted research aimed towards the study of the visual functions in children with lesions of the visual cortex. As a PhD student, she studied the neuronal mechanisms of visual attention in primates by recording the activity of single neurons in the extrastriate visual cortex. In the laboratory of Professor Goldberg at the NIH, and later at Columbia University, she investigated the neuronal activity of visual search and eye movements by recording the activity of single neurons in the parietal cortex in monkeys. She is currently performing research in Professor Goldberg's laboratory focused on the study of the role of the cerebellum in visual motor learning by recording the activity of single units in the monkey’s cerebellum. In addition to her research, Anna Ipata works as a volunteer for the NGO Doctors for Africa where she is the co-PI of a project in the hospital of Tosamaganga, Iringa, Tanzania, aimed at improving the early detection of neurological impairment in newborns and infants.
Columbia University: Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, Inc., New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI; U.S.A.)
Identifying the neural correlates of fear generalization during development
2019-2020: Fall and Spring
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Dr. Alessia Mastrodonato works in Dr. Christine Ann Denny’s Laboratory at Columbia University as postdoctoral fellow. She got her degree in Neurobiology at Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD in Neuroscience at Catholic University School of Medicine in Rome.
Her work focuses on investigating the mechanisms underlying ketamine-induced stress resilience and how individual memories are modified by ketamine administration. She is author of several papers in high impact factor journals, but most importantly, within two years of joining her lab at Columbia, she has published two first-authored manuscripts in Biological Psychiatry and Scientific Reports and co-author a third manuscript in Neuropsychopharmacology. In 2017, she was awarded the Rotary Global Grant to investigate the brain circuits underlying ketamine prophylactic efficacy, and, in 2018, she was awarded the Sackler Award by the Sackler Institute of Developmental Psychobiology at Columbia University to investigate ketamine effects during adolescence. Alessia was recently awarded the 2018 Trainee Professional Development Award (TPDA) to attend the SfN 2018 Conference and present her work on prophylactic ketamine. In addition to research, Alessia also enjoys organizing events and activities for the Columbia Postdoctoral Society (CUPS) at Columbia University, as she was recently elected chair of networking and community building.
During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will focus on identifying the neural ensembles underlying fear generalization during development in a murine preclinical model. In particular, she will investigate the brain circuits underlying fear generalization through behavioral and whole brain imaging analysis.
For more publications: https://scholar.google.it/citations?hl=en&user=_1zeWiIAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
Sveučilište u Zagrebu (Croatia)
Urban heritage of modernism on the Adriatic coast: transformation of the Italian post-industrial Mediterranean landscape
2019-2020: Fall
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Alen Žunić completed his Master's in Architecture, in 2013 at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb (summa cum laude). He continued his studies at the AA London Visiting School (2011) and the ETH Summer Academy (2012). In 2015, he completed his postgraduate Master's degree in history and philosophy of architecture at the GSD Harvard University; in 2016, he received his PhD at the FA in Zagreb, where he is also a research associate; he recently finished his post-doctorate research at ETH Zürich - GTA Institute, focusing on modern and contemporary architecture.
He currently works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and is a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb. He works as a critic and theoretician with more than 250 published scientific and professional papers.
Žunić has published 14 books as an author, co-author or editor: Context of Architecture (2014), Boris Magaš – Thoughts on Architecture (2014, 2018), several editions of Zagreb Architecture Guide – An Anthology of 100 Buildings (2012, 2013, 2015, 2018), the monograph Architect Branko Kincl (2016), Velimir Neidhardt: Thinking Architecture (2018). The most recent book that he co-authored is the great monograph Islamic Architecture and Art in Croatia – Ottoman and Contemporary Heritage (2018).
He exhibited at the Zagreb Salon of Architecture, Architectural Salon in Novi Sad, and multiple times at the annual exhibition of the Croatian Architects' Association. He received awards in competitions for urban design and architecture.
2022: Spring
Painting, Drawing & Video, and Sculpture
Born in Italy (Foggia, 1986), he lives and works in Berlin.
Agostino Iacurci studied Visual Arts and Etchings at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
His practice embraces a wide range of media, including painting, mural, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Iacurci combines his artworks with scenographic spaces to transform the perception of given environments. Starting from specific topics like the use of colors in the ancient and classical world, he questions issues of traditions and identity, investigating the process of idealization underlying historical myths and their impact on the collective imagination.His work has been shown in solo exhibitions including, Tracing Vitruvio,Musei Civici, Pesaro (2019); Gypsoteca , M77 Gallery, Milano (2018); Trompe l’oeil, Celaya Brothers Gallery, Mexico City (2017).
Recent group shows include: Talent Prize 2019 , Mattatoio, Roma (2019), Graffiare il presente , Casa Testori, Novate Milanese (2018), Urban Art Biennale, Völkinger Hütte, European Centre for Art and Industrial Culture, Germany (2017), Cross the streets , Museo Macro Roma (2017); FADA, House of Madness, The Watermill Center, New York, (2016); 16° Premio Cairo, Palazzo della Permanente, Milano (2015); Codici sorgenti, Palazzo Platamone, Catania (2015); From Street to Art, Italian Cultural Institute of New York (2015).
His works have become landmarks for several public and private institutions such as: Yakutsk Biennale, Yakutia (2017), BBDO headquarter, Southbank, London (2017); Distrito Tec University, Monterrey, (2016); Govind Puri Metro Station, New Delhi (2016); Istituto Mario Penna, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Puerto Rico's Stadium, Puerto Rico (2015); “Le Tour 13”, Paris (2014); Besançon University Campus, Besançon (2013); “Fubon Art Foundation”, Taipei (2012); Saba School in Western Saharawi (2011).
He is the recipient of Premio New York – ISCP (2020).
Photo Credit: Lorenzo Palmieri