The University of Technology (Baghdad, Iraq)
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Preserving cultural and architectural heritage in Iraq for positive peace
2021-2022: Spring
Dr. Venus Suleiman Akef is an award-winning architect and scholar. She received her PhD in Architecture in 2019 and graduated with a Certificate in Historic Preservation in 2018, both from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her BSc and MSc in Architecture from the University of Technology in Baghdad, Iraq, where she currently works as an academic and faculty member.
Dr. Akef is the first Iraqi architect and scholar to speak at the General Assembly of the United Nations, introducing the concept of her PhD dissertation, Architecture for Positive Peace: The Role of Architecture in the Process of rebuilding Peace within conflict and postwar contexts. She is the first female winner of the Architect Prize of the Arab World, organized by the Arab League in 2009. She has been on the list of creative academics and scholars by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq since 2010. She is the first female winner of Tamayouz, the Excellence Award in Architecture, for the Rising Star Category of Women in Architecture and Construction, 2014. She is also the winner of the Many Languages One World (MLOW) international competition, organized by ELS Educational Services, Inc., and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI), 2016. In 2020, She worked as the research assistant at the Iraq Hub for the international project led by the University of Leeds, United Kingdom: (Re) Contextualizing Contested Heritage: Building Capacity & Designing Participatory Approaches to Preserve Cultural Heritage by the Youth (United Kingdom, Iraq- Lebanon- Kosovo), 2020. She also serves as the Editor of the Preservation Section at the Iraqi Journal of Architectural Engineering and Planning (IQJAP), 2019- present.
Her research is currently focused on the role of architecture in postwar contexts, architecture as a platform for rebuilding a sustainable peace, preservation as a sustainable development strategy, cultural and architectural conservation, and building the discourse of the local architecture in the modern history of Iraq since 1900 (architecture and the sociopolitical transformations in Iraq since 1900).
Independent Scholar (Italy)
The illness of desire: a cultural history of heroin 1996–2018
2021-2022: Fall
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Vanessa Roghi is a historian. She holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary History. She has been teaching visual history at La Sapienza University, Rome for the past 15 years. Her research has focused on the impact of historical communication through films and television on contemporary imaginaries. She is the author and director of numerous historical documentaries. She has been working on two research projects financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) on Mussolini and the film industry in twentieth-century Italy. Her cultural history of heroin consumption in Italy is the first recent account on this topic. She studies the history of intellectuals, ideas, and margins.
Website: https://vanessaroghi.com
Università di Torino (Italy)
Hate speech and hate crimes
2021-2022: Fall
Valeria Marcenò is Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Turin (Italy), where she teaches Constitutional Law and Constitutional Justice.
From 2015 to 2017, she was the study assistant to the President of the Italian Constitutional Court, Professor Marta Cartabia. Currently, she is vice-president of the Bioethics Committee of the University of Turin and vice-director of teaching of the Department of Law of the University of Turin.
Among her works are La neutralizzazione del potere giudiziario (Jovene, 2009), La legge abrogata. Esistenza, validità, efficacia (Giappichelli, 2013) and Giustizia costituzionale (il Mulino, 2012 and 2018) with Professor G. Zagrebelsky.
Her research at the Italian Academy will be focused on hate speech and criminal regulation. The principle of free expression of thought, considered to be one of the cardinal principles of any democratic constitution, makes it difficult to identify the difference between free expression and the incitement of hate, what could be considered the small step between hate speech and hate crime.
Website: https://www.giurisprudenza.unito.it/do/docenti.pl/Alias?valeria.marceno#...
University of Manchester (UK)
"Moneta Sonante": the Friulian Bell of Dante and the material culture of money in Renaissance Italy
2021-2022: Spring
Stefano Locatelli is an economic and social historian of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, specialising in the monetary history of the Italian peninsula. His research treats money and its most direct manifestation, coinage, as a product of human activity, and explores the complexities of its interlinked social, cultural, and political dimensions. His doctoral dissertation, The Other Side of the Coin: The Political Life of the Gold Florin of Florence and its Agents, 1258-1284 (monograph due with Manchester University Press), reassessed the historical trajectory of a well-known Italian currency, the Florentine gold florin, in the context of the interactions between the merchants of Florence, the Angevin Crown in the Kingdom of Sicily and the Papacy. At the Italian Academy, Locatelli will work on his next project concerning the material culture of money and its cultural meanings in Renaissance Italy.
Locatelli holds a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Manchester (2019), where he has recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (2019-21). This followed another postdoctoral fellowship at the Italian Institute for Historical Studies in Naples (2018-19). His work has recently appeared in outlets such as The Numismatic Chronicle and Revue Numismatique. He has also co-edited the volume The Italian Coins in the British Museum, Volume 1: South Italy, Sicily, Sardinia. He currently coordinates or collaborates on various projects with Princeton University (FLAME project), The British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum and the University of Milan.
Università di Roma, Tor Vergata (Italy)
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Dialogues carved in stone: partnerships between architect-sculptors and their role in the diffusion of architectural "varietas" in late 15th-century Rome
2021-2022: Spring
Sara Bova is an architectural historian with a specific interest in patronage, material culture, and cross-cultural influences on architecture, notably in the Early Modern Period. She earned her Ph. D. in Architectural and Urban History at the Università IUAV di Venezia in 2017. She previously studied at the Università degli Studi “Mediterranea” di Reggio Calabria, where she graduated in Architecture (2009), and at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, where she gained a High Specialization Course Diploma in History of Architecture (2012).
Her research mainly focuses on the influence of Greek Humanism on patrons’ architectural choices, considering them in the framework of their political and symbolic aspirations, economic resources, and literary sources. In her current research project, she aims to analyze the role played by the still-medieval organizational structure of workshops and building sites on the rise and character of the early-Renaissance architectural language, and also to assess how stonemasons' artistic and architectural practices contributed to defining the architectural identity of their working contexts, in particular in fifteenth-century Rome.
She received research and travel grants from the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome (2012, 2013), where she contributed to studying and inventorying several architectural drawing collections; and also from the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura (CISA) Andrea Palladio (2016), and the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) (2020). Since 2018 she has been a Teaching Assistant in several Italian universities, while also collaborating as Research Assistant with the Superintendence for Architectural Heritage of the Vatican Museums (2018-2019), and with the Polo Museale del Lazio (Museum Center of Lazio) of the Italian Ministry of Culture (2019).
The New School for Social Research (New York, USA)
The political economy of nationalist populisms
2021-2022: Fall
Sanjay G. Reddy is professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. At the Italian Academy he will focus on the political economy of nationalist populisms, seeking to put these in a comparative and global perspective that will help to understand their common assertion at this moment in history. He will examine how and why conventional economic and political theories must be extended to make sense of this phenomenon. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and has a PhD in economics from Harvard University. Read more about him here: http://www.sanjayreddy.com/about
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).
Visiting Scholar
Goldsmiths College
University of London (UK)
Togetherness as borderlinking, empathy, and interconnectedness
2021-2022: Fall and Spring
Tudor Balinisteanu, a Visiting Scholar at the Academy, is currently researching empathy as studied within neuroaesthetics, psychology of the arts, and development psychology frameworks. The focus on empathy is developed through a number of international collaborative research projects. Thus, he is leading PoeticA, an international Romanian-Norwegian research consortium project on the biological universals of the aesthetic experience of poetry, in which neural entrainment to rhythm and conceptual metaphors engendering anticipation of reward are major topics. He is equally invested in research on the origins of dance in mutual entrainment, and on how mutual entrainment underpins the experience of empathy in adult life. With funding from the European Union, he is also working in a team developing empathic visual identities for medical AIs, aiming to create a joint US-Romanian spin-off entity within the VIVAET (Visual identities of Virtual Agents with Empathic Traits) project. Currently, this team, to be further enlarged, involves scholars from New Mexico State University, the University Institute of Lisbon, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Other major research interests are linked to medical humanities and mental health, and are connected to empathy engendered in partnered dance in pairs, especially improvisation. Previously he has worked in literary studies specializing at doctoral level in contemporary Scottish and Irish women's writing, and at postdoctoral level in Irish modernism, especially W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. Tudor Balinisteanu has established the first Neuroaesthetics Lab in Romania, at the University of Suceava (https://neuroaestheticslab.usv.ro/). The Lab's research outcomes will inform the development of the first neuroaesthetics course in Romania.
Università di Padova (Italy)
Color names for clothing dyes: between nature and culture
2021-2022: Fall
Mathieu Harsch is a medieval historian specializing in economic history and the history of technology. His doctoral dissertation "Dyeing and natural dyes in the late Middle Ages. Florence, Tuscany, the Mediterranean" deals with the question of dyeing and the economy of natural dyes within a general history of textiles by confronting technical treatises, sources of economic history such as entrepreneurial accounts, and a second-hand scientific literature on the chemistry of dyes or the biology of dye plants. His research extends to related topics such as labor history, commercial history, or color history. At the Academy, he will work on this last topic, especially on the relationship between natural dyes and color names.
Mathieu Harsch holds a Ph.D. from the consortium of the Universities of Padua, Venice Ca' Foscari and Verona in joint supervision with the University of Paris (2020), an M.A. degree from the Universities of Bologna and Paris Diderot (2015), and a B.A. degree from the University of Lorraine (2013). He also taught Medieval Urban History at the Gustave Eiffel University.
University of California, Berkeley (USA)
Italian nationalism and Indian fascism: Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Savarkar
2021-2022: Fall
I am a historian of modern South Asia. In my first book, I looked at the development of Indian classical music under colonialism, arguing that in response to colonial denigration of "native" music as mere "caterwauling," two key musician/musicologists produced for India a classical music with an antique pedigree, effectively placing a Hindu theory and history over a Muslim performative practice. In the process of cleansing music of its past associations with princely court indolence and debauchery, they sacralized it instead and turned classical music, newly genealogized, into a modernizing and nationalizing tool. In my second book I am writing an intellectual biography of the form of right wing Hindu nationalist politics that goes by the name of "Hindutva" by focusing on one of the key ideologues - V.D. Savarkar - of the idea that India is a Hindu nation.
University of Warwick (UK)
Fiscality and historiography: Renaissance Italian history writing and the development of political economy
2021-2022: Spring
Giorgio Lizzul is a medieval and Renaissance historian focusing on intellectual and economic history. He holds a PhD in History from King’s College London, an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from UCL and Queen Mary, and a BSc in Government and Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been a research fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2020–21); Das Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Neulateinische Studien, Innsbruck; the Newberry Library, Chicago; The British School at Rome; and a member on the ERC project “Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular” at the Department of Italian Studies, University of Warwick. Between 2016–17 he was Teaching Fellow in Medieval European History at King’s College London and has also taught intellectual history at UCL and Queen Mary.
Giorgio’s research concerns the intersection of economic, political and ethical thought with the financial institutions of medieval and Early Modern Italy. Currently he is reworking his thesis into a monograph Debt and the Republic: Economic Thought and Public Debt in Italy 1300–1550. His latest research article "Liberality as a Fiscal Problem in Medieval and Renaissance Thought: A Genealogy from Aristotle’s Tyrant to Machiavelli’s Prince" is forthcoming in The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is currently completing a co-edited volume with Gábor Almási on work ethics in medieval and Early Modern Europe for Palgrave Macmillan.
At the Italian Academy, he will be researching the relationship between fiscality and history writing in medieval and Early Modern Italy. This is a comparative research project that will be the basis for a second monograph entitled Fiscality and the Past.
Università della Svizzera italiana (Mendrisio, Switzerland)
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Graphic satire and the public perception of architecture: a missing genre
2021-2022: Spring
Gabriele Neri (Milan, 1982) is an architectural historian and architect. He is currently Mâitre d’enseignement et de recherche at the Accademia di architettura of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Mendrisio, CH. Since 2011, he has been adjunct professor of History of Design and Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan. He holds a Ph.D. in History of Architecture and Urban Planning (Polytechnic of Turin, 2011). In 2018, he was appointed member of the Board of Directors of the Fondazione Museo del Design (Triennale Milano).
Since 2008, he has been studying the relationship between satire and architecture in the twentieth century in Europe, Australia and the US. This research led to the publication of the volume Caricature architettoniche. Satira e critica del progetto moderno (Macerata, 2015), one of the first attempts ever to present an international overview and collection on the theme.
His research also focuses on the work of the Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi: Gabriele Neri is the author of Capolavori in miniatura. Pier Luigi Nervi e la modellazione strutturale (Mendrisio, 2014), Pier Luigi Nervi in Africa (Macerata and Cape Town, 2021), and the curator of an anthology with Nervi’s writings (Novara, 2014).
He has curated various exhibitions and volumes on twentieth century architecture, including: Vico Magistretti Architetto milanese (Triennale Milano, 2021), “Umberto Riva. Forme” (Galleria Sozzani, Milan 2019), “Louis Kahn and Venezia” (with E. Barizza, TAM Mendrisio, 2018), etc. His articles on architecture appear regularly on the cultural pages of the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
Web page: https://search.usi.ch/en/people/b9de9895635627e1bae6efc33aebbc60/neri-ga...
Università di Milano (Italy)
Visiting Scholar
Transformative gazes: meeting the other's eyes in virtual reality
2021-2022: Fall
Federica Cavaletti, a Visiting Scholar at the Academy, is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan, within the ERC-funded project “An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images” (AN-ICON). Her research spans across aesthetics, media studies, and the cognitive sciences, and it combines theoretical and empirical methods (mostly qualitative ones). Currently, she is working on the first-person experience of virtual reality environments. More in detail, she is focusing on the dynamics of the gazes implied in these environments, also in relation to the applications of virtual reality in professional domains such as psychology, psychiatry, and medicine.
Before becoming part of the AN-ICON project, Federica obtained her Ph.D. degree in Humanities (curriculum: Communication, Media, and Performing Arts) at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan. The topic of her dissertation was time perception in audiovisual media, which she also explored by means of a particular qualitative method (micro-phenomenological interviews). In addition to having published several papers in international journals, Federica is the Italian translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics.
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institute (Italy)
"Meliora latent": art, concealment, and clandestinity before Modernity
2021-2022: Fall
Fabian Jonietz is the leader of a research project on the pre-modern commemoration of animals at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. He is also an associated scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institute), where he previously held the position of a Wissenschaftlicher Assistant (2011‒2020). After receiving his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Munich (2012), his research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships (most recently ‒ 2020 ‒ at the Collegium Carolinum and at the Forschungszentrum Gotha), and he was invited for visiting professorships by the universities of Basel, Konstanz, Mainz, and Munich.
Fabian Jonietz’s research interests focus on aspects of early modern artistic theory and historiography, as well as the impact of written descriptions of artworks on the visual perception and interpretation of images (the subject of his 2017 monograph "Das Buch zum Bild"). His co-edited volumes include a book on the concept of Aemulatio (2011), The Paradigm of Vasari (2016), and Ghiberti teorico (2019). He is currently preparing an edited volume on indecent imagery, and he organizes a conference on the relation of artistic and medical practices and theories in European and extra-European countries.
During his stay at the Academy, he will be working on a book project dedicated to secret aspects of artistic production, clandestine collections, and the concept of scarcity between c. 1400 and 1800.
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute
Columbia University (New York, USA)
Motor memories of the mechanical properties of objects
2021-2022: Spring
Dr. Evan Cesanek is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. He studies how the brain controls movement, with a particular focus on the mechanisms that enable humans to skillfully grasp and manipulate objects. His inventive behavioral experiments use sophisticated virtual reality and haptic interfaces to create realistic but tightly controlled simulations of real physical objects. His latest work demonstrates the need for an entirely new approach to the way that the mechanical properties of objects, which are critical for motor control, are thought to be stored in memory. His research has also revealed surprising interactions between the control of grasping movements and 3D visual perception. Dr. Cesanek received his PhD in Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences from Brown University and his BA in Cognitive Science from Vassar College.
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy)
Angelica against Orlando: masses, desire, élite. How Jews, exiles, and anti-fascists reshaped the Italian Renaissance—a global perspective
2021-2022: Fall
Enrico Fantini holds a Ph.D. from Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) in Modern Languages and Philology. He was visiting student at the École Normale Supérieur, Paris (Rue d'Ulm), and in 2019 Wallace Fellow at Villa I Tatti - Harvard University (Florence). His research is devoted to 16th and 20th-century Italian culture. Dr. Fantini's works focus on the morphological evolution of the Italian literature during the transition (both ideological and institutional) from the fascist era to the democratic period (1929-1956); the political implication of the relations between high and popular culture in Early Modern Italy; and the reformist/utopian literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
At the Academy, Dr. Fantini presents a new project in which he aims to reconstruct the genealogy of the technocratic approach (1890-1940). Starting from a global perspective, his research intends to highlight the contribution of the Italian intellectuals belonging to political and religious minorities (particularly in their exchange with the U.S.) in shaping a new relationship between the masses and élite.
Dr. Fantini’s long-term ambition is to provide a new intellectual history of the transnational technocratic theory in the Western world. Merging sociology, historiography, literature and philology, he intends, on the one hand, to work on the rise of a new urban social stratum oriented toward a political “critical attitude” long before the Enlightenment, surveying the European diffusion of the utopian and reformist literature. On the other, he will explore the intellectual traditions through which the cosmopolitan and elitist approach became predominant.
Scuola Normale Superiore
Pisa (Italy)
“Hegemony is born in the factory”: the politics of productivity in postwar Italy
2021-2022: Spring
Bruno Settis received his Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and the Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris, in 2019 with a thesis on The Fordist "Social contract." Industrial relations from Taylorist America to the European economic miracle. He is the author of Fordismi. storia politica della produzione di massa (il Mulino, 2016) winner of the Prize awarded by Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History for the best first book. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Scuola Normale, in Pisa. His research project at the Italian Academy aims at investigating the politics of industrial relations in postwar Italy, by analyzing its professional organizers and intermediaries (managers, experts in human engineering, labor scholars, and labor leaders).
Indiana University Bloomington (USA)
Specularity: opera, art, and science in Rome, 1680–1710
2021-2022: Spring
Ayana O. Smith is Associate Professor in Musicology in the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. She completed her doctorate in music history at Yale University, and her undergraduate degrees in Latin and music at Swarthmore College. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities/American Academy in Rome. Her interdisciplinary background in vocal performance and classical Latin, with supplementary coursework in art history, has led to a research career engaging rhetorical meanings in text, image, and music.
She is the author of the 2019 book Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome (University of California Press); this book demonstrates the importance of visual culture in literature and philosophy within the environment of the Arcadian Academy in Rome, emphasizing how the academy’s visual theories influenced operatic production at the end of the seventeenth century. Her research on Italian opera also appears in the journals Eighteenth-Century Music and Music in Art, while her research on African-American music appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and in Popular Music. Her book Race and Representation in the Music History Classroom: Leading Change through Pedagogy is scheduled to be published with Routledge in 2022. She serves on the board of directors for the American Handel Society, the editorial board of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, and is the Vice President for the Society of Seventeenth Century Music.
Her project during the fellowship period at the Academy continues her work on visual culture in seventeenth-century Rome, this time studying how ocular fascinations (comets, scientific instruments, artistic illusions) created both delight in—and distrust of—the eye, leading to shifts in popular and intellectual discourse that helped define the early Italian enlightenment. This project will result in a book titled Specularity: Opera, Art, and Science in Rome, 1680-1710.
Visiting Scholar
Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
Universiteit Gent (Belgium)
Astrid Harth is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University. She studied Art History and Paintings Conservation and obtained her PhD on the practice of copying in early Netherlandish painting at Ghent University in 2021. In 2019, she was a Chester Dale Fellow at the Department of European Paintings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). She is a member of the Ghent Interdisciplinary Centre for Art and Science (GICAS), which concentrates on the art-historical study of material aspects of artistic artefacts. She published on artistic production in early modern Europe and on the interdisciplinary study of the arts and sciences by using imaging and analytical techniques. She plans to conduct research on the northern Renaissance practice of overpainting Christian cult images.
Università di Milano (Italy)
Virtual, really? A critique of virtuality
2021-2022: Fall
Andrea Pinotti is professor in Aesthetics in the department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti”, Università di Milano. His research focuses on image theories and visual culture studies, virtual and augmented reality, memorialisation and monumentality, empathy theories, and the morphological tradition from Goethe to the present day. He has been fellow of various international institutions, including the Italian Academy at Columbia University, the Warburg Institute in London, the ZFL in Berlin, the IEA and the FMSH in Paris. Among his publications the volumes Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (1998), Memorie del neutro. Morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg(2001), Empathie. Histoire d’une idée de Platon au post-humain (2016), Cultura visuale. Immagini sguardi media dispositivi (in collaboration with Antonio Somaini, 2016). In 2018, he was awarded the Wissenschaftspreis der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg. He is currently directing an ERC-Advanced project entitled An-iconology. History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images (2019-24).
Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo (Italy)
The oblivion of a Renaissance monument: Antonello Gagini’s tribune in the Cathedral of Palermo
2021-2022: Fall
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Alessandra Buccheri is professor of History of Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. In 2009, she completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, where she received various awards (Arts & Humanities Research Council Postgraduate Award, Scatcherd European Scholarship, Isaiah Berlin Fund). She has been a fellow at the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence (2002-2003), and has worked as scientific collaborator at both the Museo Galileo in Florence (2004) and at the CRIBECU (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2003-2004). She is a partner in the research project Apropiaciones e Hibridaciones entre las Artes Plásticas y las Artes Escénicas en la Edad Moderna (2016-2020), Universidad de Málaga, founded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain).
Her main area of research is visual culture in early modern Italy, with a special focus on theater, architecture and decoration (including sculptures and paintings in their original architectural context). She is also interested in gender studies and women in the visual arts. Her published volumes include Quando l’ornamento non è delitto. Un percorso attraverso la cultura visiva siciliana dal tardo-gotico al Novecento? (2020), co-edited with Giulia Ingarao, and Archetipi del femminile. Rappresentazioni di genere, identità e ruoli sociali nell’arte dalle origini a oggi (2017), co-edited with Giulia Ingarao and Emilia Valenza. Her most recent monograph, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650. Italian Art and Theatre (2014), explores the origin and meaning of cloud compositions by looking at the complex relationship between their three-dimensional construction and display in religious and court theater, and their pictorial representations both in churches and secular buildings.
The research she will pursue at the Italian Academy focuses on the history and reception of an Italian Renaissance monument, the Tribuna, erected between 1510 and 1574 in the presbytery of Palermo’s Cathedral (Sicily), dismantled and partly destroyed between 1788 and 1801. The Tribuna, which was 24.5 metres high, entirely made of Carrara marble, and enriched with 42 life-size statues, has largely been overlooked by scholars, institutions, and public alike. The main aim of this project is to refocus attention on the Tribuna and bring it back to both public and scholarly attention.
Website: http://www.accademiadipalermo.it/index.php/profilo-docente/?teacher_id=5
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