Fellows (old)

Academia Sinica (Taiwan)

Burke Fellow in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage in Japan and Italy

Chinese Baimiao painting and European drawing at the Qing Dynasty court

2024–2025: Fall

Yu-chih Lai is an art historian specialized in Chinese art. Her two fields of research are Shanghai art in the 19th century, and the globalized visual and material culture of the Manchu Chinese court in the 18th century. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University and is an associate researcher in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

She has received many important grants, fellowships, and visiting positions, including: Member of the Institute for Advanced Study; Foreign Researcher of the Institute of Advanced Studies on Asia at The University of Tokyo: Heinz Goetze Visiting Professor for Chinese Art History at Heidelberg University; Post-doctoral Fellowship at the J. Paul Getty Center; and Jane and Morgan Whitney Art History Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Currently she is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Visual Governance: Art, Knowledge, and Politics in the 18th-Century Qing Court.

Website: https://sinica.academia.edu/UserDetailaspxuserID119mid16tmid2

Yeshiva University

Antiquities, Museums and Historical Writing in the Late Renaissance

2005-2006

William Stenhouse is Assistant Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, before receiving an MA from the Warburg Institute in Renaissance historical studies and a Ph.D. in history from University College London. He is the author of articles on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classical scholarship and two books: the volume of the Cassiano dal Pozzo catalogue raisonné devoted to drawings of inscriptions (2002), and Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (2005), a study of the interpretation of classical inscriptions and sixteenth-century recreations of the ancient world. At the Italian Academy, he will be exploring the connections between museums and the writing of history in the second half of the sixteenth century. He will focus on the ways in which the display of antiquities in Italian collections changed the ideas of scholars across Europe about what constituted historical evidence and how they were to present their own historical scholarship.

Independent Scholar and Translator

Toronto

Two translations: Flavio Biondo's Roma Instaurata and Gianni Vattimo's Dialogo con Nietzsche 

2004-2005

William McCuaig is an independent scholar and translator living in Toronto. He holds two graduate degrees in Renaissance Studies from the Warburg Institute, University of London: M. Phil, for a dissertation on Bernardo Rucellai of Florence (1448-1514), a political actor and historian; and Ph. D., for a thesis on Carlo Sigonio (c. 1522-1584), an ancient and medieval historian. During the period 1985-1987 William held a posto di perfezionamento at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, where he studied European history. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, he taught early modern European history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto in Mississauga. Carlo Sigonio. The changing world of the late Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) is his major independent publication. His translations include works by Federico Chabod, Carlo Rosselli, and Piero Gobetti. At the Italian Academy, he will prepare translations of a Latin work by the fifteenth-century humanist Flavio Biondo (for I Tatti Renaissance Library) and the collected articles of the philosopher Gianni Vattimo on Friedrich Nietzsche (for Columbia University Press).

Vanderbilt University

War, economy and culture in Italy, 1330–1450.

2014-2015: Spring

I am a Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of medieval European history at Vanderbilt University. My primary field of study is economic history, with interest also in literature. I received my Ph.D from Yale University in 1992, where I primarily studied Greek and Latin patristics. Full bio: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/caferro.html

Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

Bias and the virtues and skill of attention: philosophical, psychological, and neural perspectives

2023–2024: Fall

Wayne Wu teaches in philosophy and in the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published on agency, attention, consciousness, and perception. His recent book, Movements of the Mind (Oxford, 2023), presents a comprehensive theory of action, attention and intention, and his first book, Attention (Routledge, 2014) helped to establish attention as a central topic of research in contemporary philosophy of mind. He has also published an overview on the neuroscience of consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

At the Italian Academy, he will research attention and bias, both good and ill, bridging philosophical and neurobiological perspectives to help explain bias and explore how biases in attention and agency can be positively transformed.

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Co-sponsored by the Kress Foundation

Italian sculpture in the Netherlands: 1530-1556

2008-2009

Walter Cupperi (1976) was educated at the University of Pisa (MA in Humanities) and at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (diploma di licenza and PhD in History of Art). He received research fellowships from the American Academy in Rome (Italian Fulbright Fellow), the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (assegno di ricerca), the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome), as well as several scholarships and grants around Europe (Warburg Institute, London; Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Ministère de la Communauté Française, Brussels; Società Numismatica Italiana, Milan). 

His areas of special interest include the history of sculpture and metalworks from the 11th to 16th century, portraits in sculptural media, and specific aspects of the classical tradition in the visual arts (re-use, plaster and bronze casts after the antique, collections of antiquities, the history of numismatics, and sarcophagi and burial typologies). Together with Salvatore Settis, he also co-edited a volume of F.C. Panini’s Mirabilia Italiae series, Palazzo Schifanoia a Ferrara, Modena 2007. 

He is currently working on numerous projects concerning cultural exchanges among the Habsburg dominions in Europe, a topic to which he also dedicated his PhD dissertation, Le medaglie nella Milano asburgica (1535-1571): artisti, committenti e fortuna europea. 

His most recent publications are Autorisierte Herrscherbildnisse des Leone Leoni: die Bronzebüsten Karls V. in Madrid, Wien und Windsor Castle, in Drei Fürstenbildnisse: Meisterwerke der Repraesentatio Maiestatis der Renaissance, exhibition cat., Dresden, Grünes Gewölbe, April, 10th 2008 - June, 9th 2008, ed. by M. Minning, Dresden 2008, pp. 27-38, and Il busto di Alfonso II d’Avalos ed altre opere di Annibale Fontana, in “Prospettiva”, 125, 2007, pp. 38-52, concerning the authorship of a bronze bust now at the Morgan Library, New York.

NEST INFM CNR National Research Council

Co-sponsored by the Center for Integrated Science & Engineering, Columbia University

The physics and applications of graphene-based nanodevices

2008-2009: Fall

Vittorio Pellegrini received his PhD in physics from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1997. Currently he is a senior researcher at the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics (INFM) of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, where he coordinates the research line "Semiconductor nanostructures for nanoelectronics and spin-photonics."
His scientific interests are in nanoscience. In particular his experimental work currently focuses on the study of emergent states of interacting electrons in nanostructures by means of elastic and inelastic light scattering and magneto-transport. Systems of interest include two-dimensional electrons in semiconductor quantum heterostructures and graphene, few-electron states in quantum dots, and hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanostructures. Additional experimental activity is concerned with single-molecule imaging and with investigation of protein trafficking and interaction.
Vittorio Pellegrini is a member of the executive committee of NEST (National Enterprise for nanoScience and nanoTechnology) center at the Scuola Normale Superiore, member of the "List of Experts" of the Italian Ministry of University and Research, and editor of the international journal Solid State Communications. He teaches "physics of nanostructures" at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the Scuola Superiore in Catania. He served as chair of many international conferences and coordinated several national and international research projects.

Università di Parma (Italy)

Embodying cultural practices: a neuropragmatic approach

2022-2023: Fall and Spring

Vittorio Gallese, MD and trained neurologist, is Professor of Psychobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Medicine & Surgery of the University of Parma, Italy, Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Department of Art History and Archeology, Columbia University, and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of London's School of Advanced Study. As a cognitive neuroscientist, his research focuses on the relationship between the sensorimotor system and cognition by investigating the neurobiological and bodily grounding of intersubjectivity, psychopathology, language and aesthetics. His major scientific contribution is the discovery of mirror neurons, together with the colleagues of Parma, and the development of a new model of perception and imagination: Embodied Simulation Theory. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and three books.

For the Academic Year 2023-24, he will be affiliated with the Italian Academy as an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar.

Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vittorio-Gallese

Università Federico II di Napoli

Aging and disease: coping with oxidation-driven cellular processes

2008-2009: Spring

Vittorio Enrico Avvedimento is professor of General Pathology at the Medical School of University "Federico II," Napoli. He received his MD degree at the University of Napoli and completed a residency in Neurology at the School of Neurology of the same University. He spent 2 years, 1978-80, in the laboratory of Molecular Biology, at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in Bethesda. In 1987 he was awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship, ACS. In 2002 he spent the year at the Institute of Cancer Research, Columbia University, as "L. Schaffner" fellow. He is currently coordinator of the PhD program in Molecular Pathology at the University "Federico II," Napoli. This program was ranked in 2007 first among the 120 PhD programs of the University by an independent panel of reviewers.
Avvedimento has been directly involved in the cloning of the first prototypic collagen gene (Cell, 1980, 21, 689-696; Cell, 22, 887-892) and thyroglobulin gene (PNAS, 1986 83, 323-327). By using these molecular tools he dissected a prevalent phenotype in epithelial tumors: the loss of differentiation memory of mammalian cells during neoplastic transformation. The experiments in transformed thyroid cells revealed some general mechanisms governing the transmission of signals by two main transducers, cAMP and Ras. Although these signals were involved in multiple phenotypes, the mechanisms by which they regulated growth and differentiation in mammalian cells were still obscure.
The relevant discoveries can be summarized as follows: 1. Oscillations of the cAMP drive the mitosis in fertilized Xenopus eggs (Science, 1996, 271, 1718-1722). 2. The localization and the type of transducer regulate the timing and the intensity of cAMP nuclear signaling. Neoplastic transformation (Ras) represses differentiation memory by altering the localization of cAMP kinase, PKA (Gen. Dev. 1991, 5, 22-28; 1992, 6, 1621; J.Biol.Chem. 1996, 271, 25350-25359). 3. Somatic mutations of TSH receptor gene drive thyroid hyperfunctioning adenomas (J.Clin. End. Metab., 1994, 79, 657-661).
The information and the tools generated by these discoveries were translated in vivo by inactivating or stimulating specific genes encoding the regulators of these transducers (Ras or cAMP) in several animal models of human diseases--so called somatic gene therapy (Nature Medicine, 1995, 1, 541-545; see also comments and News & Views in the same issue or in Nature, 1995, 375, 433; Nature Medicine, 1996, 2, 634-635; Nature Medicine 1997, 3, 775-779).
In the last 5 years Avvedimento has been focusing his attention on the basic mechanism(s) underlying human diseases. Progressively, during this period, several basic scientific issues, independently approached, are converging on a more comprehensive evolutionary vision. Aging and illness in humans represent a successful compromise between preserving genome stability versus oxidation-driven cellular processes. Oxidation, the basic energy-producing process, is costly, since it continuously attacks DNA and jeopardizes genome stability (New Engl. J. Med (2006) 354 (25): 2667-76). Recent data from the laboratory show that DNA damage and faithful repair are marked by an epigenetic scar (methylation) that silences the surrounding gene(s). This scar, by silencing damaged and repaired genes, represents a powerful evolutionary force, since it preserves the genetic information and reduces further damage to the genome (PLoSGenet. 2007 vol. 3, pp. 1144-1162). At the same time, other data from the lab indicate that oxidation, selective DNA damage and repair drive the basic transcription machinery used by sex hormones (Science 2008 Jan 11;319 (5860): 202-6). How can these two aspects of the same process (genome stability and oxidation) be reconciled? Senescence and diseases may directly derive from the imbalance of oxidation and silencing on gene expression.
While at Columbia, in collaboration with Max E. Gottesman, he will try to answer some of these questions by tracking down some relevant players linking DNA damage to gene silencing and repair.

Università Ca' Foscari - Venice

The Venetian scala di Spalato as seen from Ottoman documents

2010-2011: Spring

PhD in Ottoman History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Vera Costantini is ricercatrice of Turkish Language and Literature since 2003. She lectures in Turkish Language, Ottoman History and Paleography both at Ca' Foscari and at the University of Palermo. Her main interests of research concern Early Modern economic history of the Mediterranean.

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).

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.

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

University of Heidelberg

Dark energy cosmologies and predictions for future experiments

2009-2010: Fall

Valeria Pettorino got her Ph.D. in physics in 2005 at the University Federico II in Napoli, Italy, and in collaboration with SISSA, Trieste, Italy. In 2005-2006, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Torino (Italy); she then moved to SISSA in 2007 within the D4 Project. She was named Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg, Germany , where she worked from July 2007 until July 2009.
She works on several aspects concerning cosmology, the study of the content and evolution of the Universe. In particular, her areas of expertise concern dark energy, a component contributing to about 74% of the content of the Universe and providing cosmological acceleration. She investigates this issue from a theoretical point of view, within coupled quintessence theories as well as scalar tensor theories. Furthermore, she investigates effects on observations both within linear perturbations, on cosmic microwave background and at the non linear level, within structure formation, also via N-body simulations. She has recently joined the PLANCK and EUCLID collaborations.

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#...

Institut Jean Nicod (ENS-CNRS-EHESS) - Paris

Vision to reason: visual routines for manipulating diagrams

2010-2011: Fall

Valeria Giardino obtained her Doctorate in 2006 at the University of Rome "La Sapienza." In her thesis, she discussed the use of figures and diagrams in mathematics. In 2007, she was an Associate Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institut Jean Nicod. From 2008 to 2010, her research at the Institut Nicod on Diagram-based Reasoning was supported by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program under a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development. Her current research aims at developing a theory about the way and the reasons that led humans to increase the powers of their mind by relying on external cognitive tools. She has published a book in Italian, together with Prof. Piazza, Senza Parole. Ragionare con le Immagini (Without Words. Reasoning with Images; Milano: Bompiani), and several articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Columbia University (USA)

Alexander Bodini Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

The neural geometry of emotions: cognitive implications and individual variability

2025–⁠2026: Fall

I am a physicist by training and currently an associate research scientist at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience of Columbia University. I collaborate closely with experimentalists to uncover the computational principles and the neural geometry underlying cognitive processes like decision-making and emotional states. I build interpretable, data-driven models using machine learning, dynamical systems modeling, and decoding analyses to understand how the geometry of neural activity shapes behavior.

Previously, during my PhD in Neuroscience, I quantified intrinsic neural timescales across cortical areas, and the basal ganglia to reveal how slow and fast dynamics support distinct computations. Before transitioning into neuroscience, I earned a BSc in physics and an MSc in particle physics and I worked at CERN on rare K⁺ meson decays and heavy-neutrino searches—running Monte Carlo simulations and developing real-time trigger algorithms.

More information: valeriafascianelli.com

Accademia Italiana (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Curating dissonance: Fascist and colonial afterlives in Italian heritage across public space, museum narratives, and digital counter-archives

2026–2027: Fall

Valentina Gioia Levy is an art historian, curator, writer, and educator whose work explores the intersections of curatorial practice, visual culture, heritage, and the production of situated forms of knowledge. Her academic formation spans both European and Asian art histories, with an early focus on aesthetics and artistic exchanges between East and West. She studied Humanities at Sapienza University of Rome and received her PhD in Arts, Aesthetics and Art Sciences from Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne in 2025 with a dissertation on contextual curating and the transformations of contextual art in a multipolar world. She is an affiliated researcher at Institut ACTE (Arts, Créations, Théories, Esthétiques), Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne.

Combining scholarly research with over fifteen years of international curatorial practice, her work investigates how artistic and curatorial practices shape cultural narratives, negotiate social and political contexts, and contribute to the interpretation of places, objects, and collective memory. Her research spans curatorial studies, exhibition histories, visual culture, monumentality, heritage, and the circulation of images across global contexts.

She has developed research and curatorial projects throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, collaborating with institutions and initiatives including the Venice Biennale, Dak’Art Biennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, LAM360 Land Art Mongolia, Something Else Cairo, Manifesta 12, MAXXI, MACRO, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. She is also the founder of GAD – Giudecca Art District in Venice and co-founder of the interdisciplinary platform ALL FAD.

Gioia Levy teaches at Accademia Italiana in Rome and has served as Visiting Professor at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Her forthcoming book, Le tournant contextuel: Art, territoires et curatelle à l’ère de la multipolarité (L’Harmattan, 2026), develops a theoretical framework for understanding contextual curatorial practice in contemporary global art.

At the Italian Academy, she will pursue research on the afterlives of twentieth-century Italian heritage, examining how monuments, architecture, archives, and curatorial frameworks shape the interpretation, preservation, and re-signification of difficult histories in the present.

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.

Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi (Turkey)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Constructing memory in Byzantine architecture: spolia as a mnemonic device

2024–2025: Fall

Ufuk Serin is currently an associate professor of architecture at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at METU, she obtained her M.Sc. in Cultural Heritage Conservation from the same university. She received her doctoral degree in Early Christian Art and Archaeology from the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana (PIAC) in Vatican City. She has been the recipient of doctoral and post-doctoral research grants and fellowships from various prestigious institutions, including Fiat International and the Koç Foundation (1998–2000); the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (2010); the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard University (1999 and 2008); the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (2010–2011); the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in association with the School for Advanced Research (SAR) (2011); and Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) (Spring 2024–2025). Dr. Serin has decades of professional experience in archaeological field survey and excavation. She coordinated the Turkish component of the partnership in the Byzantium – Early Islam Project (BYZeIS) of the Euromed Heritage III Program, funded by the European Commission. Her research interests primarily include Late Antique and Byzantine architecture and urbanism, Early Christian and Medieval archaeology, combined with studies in architectural history, contested heritage, and the interpretation and presentation of heritage sites.

Università di Torino (Italy)

The last dragomans: teaching Oriental languages in late nineteenth-century Venice

2024–2025: Spring

A postdoctoral fellow at the University of Turin, Tommaso Munari earned a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute in Florence. His research interests encompass the history of publishing, universities, and scholarship in modern Europe, with a special focus on the exile of Jewish scholars from fascist Italy. He is a regular contributor to the Sunday literary supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore. His latest book, L’Italia dei libri (Einaudi, 2024) explores the role of publishers in Italian history from the Risorgimento to the Republic. At the Italian Academy, he will work on a project concerning the teaching of Oriental languages in late nineteenth-century Venice, tentatively titled The Last Dragomans.

Università di Perugia

Italian sculptors and the French court under Charles VIII and Louis XII

2010-2011: Spring

Columbia University/NYSPI

Longitudinal imaging of adolescents at risk for schizophrenia

2009-2010: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Tiziano Colibazzi, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Clinical Neuroscience in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University. Dr Colibazzi's research has encompassed several topics including using fMRI to probe emotional circuitry in humans and exploring structure and shape in the normal brain and in schizophrenia. More recently, Dr. Colibazzi's research has focused on understanding how the adolescent brain changes throughout development and whether this knowledge can help us predict who will develop schizophrenia.

Columbia University

Data fusion and data modeling: how Big Data can help us understand the development of illness in adolescents at ultra-high risk for psychosis.

2014-2015: Fall

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Tiziano Colibazzi, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Clinical Neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is also on faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr Colibazzi's research focuses on understanding mechanisms that lead to the development of psychotic illness through the use of anatomical imaging, functional imaging (fMRI), DTI and resting state imaging. These imaging modalities are combined through a variety of multivariate methods with the goal of identifying biological predictors of psychosis.

Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza'

Practical sense: a study of action and mind

2006-2007

Tito Magri was born in Rome in 1948. Although raised as a philosopher in the turmoil of the Italian post-1968 academy, he was sheltered from the worst effects of that time and place by an enlightened, skeptical Marxist teacher, Lucio Colletti. Beginning his career as a political philosopher and an historian of ideas, he studied for some years the foundations of modern political philosophy in the thought of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
This experience brought him into contact with analytic philosophy, which has been since the early eighties the only form of philosophical activity he can really take an interest in. He has worked on the foundations of contractarianism, on practical rationality, on the philosophy of emotions and (with exclusively analytic concerns) on the philosophy of David Hume.
He is currently completing a book-length work on the conceptual and normative content of action, and eyeing a monograph on Hume's theory of imagination. He is married and has two daughters.

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 Musicologica, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music and Letters, Mitteilungen 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.

Freie Universität Berlin

On aesthetic disinterestedness

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Thomas Hilgers is a research associate at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. His fields of research are aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of film, and German philosophy since Kant. Currently, he specifically focuses on the nature and value of aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments. His monograph on aesthetic disinterestedness will be published by Routledge in 2016. 

Web page: http://www.kunstakademie-duesseldorf.de/fachbereiche/kunstbezogene-wisse...

Heinrich Heine Universität Dusseldorf

Topology of social memory. Tomb Chapels of the Neapolitan nobility in early modern times

2004-2005

Tanja Michalsky, Ph.D. (University of Munich 1995) recently finished a study on "Projection and imagination. Conceptions of Netherlandish landscape in the dialogue between geography and painting" (supported by a scholarship from the Lise-Meitner-Programm). She has been Research Fellow in the Faculty of Art History at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main (1995-2000). Her main research interests are the relationship between (political and artistic) representation and the social network of memory, Italian late-medieval sculpture, Netherlandish painting (16th and 17th century) and the process of collective imagination in different visual media. Tanja is author of Memoria und Repräsentation. Die Grabmäler des Königshauses Anjou in Italien (2000) and the editor of Medien der Macht. Kunst zur Zeit der Anjous in Italien (2001). Most of her articles in the field of tomb sculpture deal with methodological questions concerning form, function and competition. Her papers on Netherlandish landscape painting focus on the ideological and epistemological background of its modes of visualization. She has also published articles on film and contemporary art.

Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte

Naples vertical: "deep holes" in a porous city

2018-2019: Fall

Tanja Michalsky is director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institute for Art History, in Rome since 2014.
She studied Art History, German Philology and Philosophy in Trier and Munich. Phd at the LMU Munich 1995 (Memoria und Repräsentation. Die Grabmäler des Königshauses Anjou in Italien, Göttingen 2001); 1995-2000 Research Assistant at the Department of Art History of the J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt; 2001-2004 Lise-Meitner-Fellowship, Habilitation 2004 at the Heinrich Heine-University, Düsseldorf, (Projektion und Imagination. Die niederländische Landschaft der Frühen Neuzeit im Diskurs von Geographie und Malerei, München 2011); 2005-07 Professor at the Department of Art History of the J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt; 2007-14 Professor for Art History at the University of the Arts, Berlin. 2012-14 Director of the Graduate School Das Wissen der Künste.
The common denominators of her research fields are the reflection on the epistemic status of images and ther cultural codification as well as the investigation of the political and sociological relevance and signficance oft works of art (from tomb-sculpture to landscape-painting, maps and films). Programmatically this means the combination of historical-critical material analysis with current art historical questions pertaining to globalisation (interculturalty) and the artistic production of knowledge. 

Web page: http://www.biblhertz.it/institut/mitarbeiter-und-gaeste/mitarbeiterdaten...

SUNY Stony Brook

The boundaries of conflict: identity, violence, and displacement on the Italo-Yugoslav frontier

2009-2010: Spring

Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has published numerous articles on institutional development and social dynamics of post-war societies, and in particular on the divergent narratives about the Second World War that have emerged among Istrians living in Italy and in Croatia. Through a US National Science Foundation grant, since 2008 she has been refining a new methodological approach to narrative analysis and has presented her work on narrative as an invited speaker at numerous universities and symposia in the US and abroad.

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

Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia

Dance libretto as social text: the Italian dance librettos in the Cia Fornaroli collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

2011-2012: Fall

Stefano Tomassini studied dance and drama. He currently teaches Dance History at the Ca Foscari Venezia University and Il testo in scena (Drama) at the University of the Italian Switzerland, Lugano. In the area of dance studies he has focused on Salvatore Viganò (Premio Marino Moretti), Enzo Cosimi, the 'choreosophical' writings of Aurel M. Milloss, the lectures of the American dance pioneer Ted Shawn, and dance libretti on the myths of Adonis. In 2008- 2009, he was a Fulbright-Schuman Research Scholar; in 2010, a Scholar-in- residence at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

University of Bergamo (Italy) 

Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art

Kettle of fish: toward an art history of homoerotic imagery in the HIV/AIDS crisis 

2026–2027: Spring

Stefano Mudu holds a PhD in visual culture from IUAV University of Venice. His research focuses on strategies of enactment and re-enactment in contemporary artistic production, practices of iconographic reactivation in visual culture, and the possibility of rethinking art history through the lenses of queer theory, feminism, colonialism, and pressing ecological concerns. His current work examines the role of visuality during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

He has worked as a curatorial researcher for major international exhibitions and institutions, including the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani, and “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum, New York.

He is the author of the monographs Spazi Critici. I luoghi della scrittura contemporanea (2018) and Enactments: Reactivation Strategies in Contemporary Art Practices (2026). Alongside several academic essays, he regularly contributes to publications in the field.

Conservatorio “Arrigo Pedrollo” di Musica di Vicenza

“Nata per morire”: musical memory and memory of music in early modern Europe

2014-2015: Spring

Stefano Lorenzetti studied organ and harpsichord with Kenneth Gilbert and earned his Ph. D. in History and Civilization at the European University Institute of Florence. Currently, he is professor of the History of music at Conservatory of music of Vicenza. Lorenzetti has concentrated his research activity on the history of education, on the history of ideas, on the history of the Italian oratorio, on the relationship between music and the art of memory and on performance practice and musical space. His monograph Musica e identità nobiliare nell’Italia del Rinascimento. Educazione, mentalità, immaginario, has enshrined him as one of the most significant and innovative scholars of Renaissance music. 

He has given concerts and conferences throughout Europe and the United States, in particular at the Academia Chigiana in Siena, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, at the Centre d’Etudes de la Supérieures Renaissances in Tours, at University of California, Davis (Valente lectures), at Villa I Tatti (Harvard University) and at Stanford University (Ron Alexander Lectures). 

www.umbralucis.it

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 Pisa

Johannes Kepler and the history of the calculus

2008-2009: Spring

Stefano Gattei (1970) graduated in philosophy, summa cum laude, at the University of Milan in 2003, and was awarded a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol in 2004. Back to Italy, he received a bursary from the University of Padua and was post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pisa (2005-2008). 

He has lectured widely both in Italy and abroad, and taught philosophy and history of science in Milan, Pisa and Vercelli, where he was temporary lecturer in 2005-2006. His main research areas comprise: philosophy of science in the twentieth century, methodology, the philosophy of Karl R. Popper and critical rationalism, Thomas S. Kuhn (with special reference to Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism), William Whewell, the dynamics of theory-change and conceptual-change, incommensurability, the theory of rationality; history of science, Johannes Kepler, history of astronomy and cosmology, history and philosophy of mathematics. 

He authored a few books, as well as several articles and book contributions. His most recent publications include La rivoluzione incompiuta di Thomas Kuhn, Turin: UTET, 2007; Introduzione a Popper, Rome-Bari: Laterza 2008; and the forthcoming Thomas S. Kuhn’s ‘Linguistic Turn’ and the Legacy of Logical Positivism (Aldershot: Ashgate) and Rationality without Foundations (London-New York: Routledge). He has also edited Thomas S. Kuhn, Dogma contro critica: Mondi possibili nella storia della scienza, Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2000; Ripensando il razionalismo critico, special double issue of Nuova Civiltà delle Macchine, XX, 1-2, 2002; and The Kuhn Controversy, special double issue of Social Epistemology, 17, 2-3, 2003. 

He is currently working on a Reader’s Guide to Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (to be published by Continuum Press, New York), as well as on a collection of Feyerabend’s papers in the philosophy of physics (Physics and Philosophy, under contract with Cambridge University Press, New York). He is also completing the critical edition and translation of Johannes Kepler, Strena seu De nive sexangula (1611). His research project at the Italian Academy further develops this research on Kepler, especially focusing on his mathematical works and methodology.

Free University of Berlin (Germany)

Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art

Like butterfly wings: image doubling in Early Modern displays and visual culture 

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Stefano de Bosio teaches Art History at Freie Universität Berlin – FUBiS and is the founder of the international scholarly network "Logic of the Negative: Techniques and Metaphors of Imprinting". His research investigates the visual and conceptual dynamics of orientation in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on image reversal and broader patterns of cultural transmission across Europe.

He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Turin and holds a postgraduate diploma in Cultural Heritage from the University of Bologna. His first book, Frontiere. Arte, luogo, identità ad Aosta e nell'arco alpino occidentale (Officina Libraria, 2021), which was awarded the Premio Giovanni Testori for Art Criticism, examines the role of the Western Alps as a contact zone around 1500. His current book project, Patterns of Reversal, explores the perceptual and cultural impact of image reversal in early modern art.

His work has been supported by fellowships from the DFK – German Center for Art History in Paris; the IKKM – International Research Institute for Media Philosophy in Weimar; Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut; and Imaginaries of Force, the University of Hamburg’s Center of Advanced Studies.

At the Italian Academy, Stefano de Bosio will pursue research on the cultural, perceptual, and theoretical implications of image doubling—through mirroring, replications, and counterproofing—in the display and circulation of drawings, prints, and paintings in early modern Europe.

Read here: an interview done with Stefano de Bosio after his Fellowship in autumn 2025. 

Columbia University (USA)

Habit and reward circuits in the basal ganglia

2024–2025: Fall and Spring

Stefano Cataldi has 10 years of experience in research, first at the University of Ferrara, and later through his graduate work in the Neuroscience program at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His educational background is in pharmacology. He completed his graduate program at UBC with Prof. Matthew Farrer and Dr. Austen Milnerwood where he utilized mouse genetic models of Parkinson’s Disease to understand early behavioral and neurochemical effects of the illness. He has begun investigating the basal ganglia from a movement/neurodegeneration angle, but current projects have led him towards the understanding of the association of environmental cues with reward and subsequent formation of habits. He is currently an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University (CU), studying complex cognitive abilities with a focus that includes behavioral tasks important for motor disorders as well as mental disorders such as schizophrenia and drug addiction.

At CU, he has been a steward for the Postdocs and Associate Research Scientists Union, contributing to improving working conditions for all postdocs and other employees within the university. The group's work includes the creation of the committee for power-based harassment and the working group IDEAL: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership, both aiming at creating a safe and fair work environment for all workers at Columbia.

Website: www.pharmacology.cuimc.columbia.edu/research/sulzer-lab

King's College

London

Diabolical politics: images and ideas of the devil in early Christian Rome

2006-2007

Lunn-Rockliffe graduated from the University of Oxford in 1998 with a degree in History. She moved to Cambridge University for her postgraduate studies and from there received an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, and a PhD in History. She was a Research Fellow and a Teaching Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, between 2002 and 2006, and she is now a University Lecturer in Roman History in the Classics Department of King's College, London. Her general areas of interest are political thought, the history of ideas, religious history, and the history and theory of the reception of images. Her doctoral work was on the political theology of the late Roman Christian writer Ambrosiaster; through this she developed an interest in early Christian ideas and images of the Devil in Rome, which is the subject of her research at the Italian Academy. This project will begin by investigating the supposed absence of artistic representations of the Devil from early Christian Rome. The second part, on presence, will deal with Christian images depicting the Devil in bestial form, and visual narratives of exorcism and healing which implied an invisible diabolical presence. The third part, on memory, will deal with Christian memories of and attitudes towards the physical remains of pagan Rome.

University of Cagliari (Italy)

Fashioning in gold and steel: the science and art of Giuliano Ferraccini, Medici swordsmith

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Simone Picchianti earned his Master’s degree in History of Culture and Mentalities from the University of Florence in 2015, with a thesis in history and art history focused on the creation of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He subsequently specialized in the study of arms and armor, collaborating with major Florentine institutions such as the Stibbert Museum, the Bargello Museum, and the Uffizi Gallery. He later worked with the “Luigi Marzoli” Arms Museum in Brescia and, on an ongoing basis, with the Royal Armory in Turin. Within these institutions, his work has encompassed both exhibition design and artifact research, with particular attention to the preparation of materials for temporary exhibitions. His research has focused not only on the production techniques and stylistic features of arms and armor, but also on their broader social implications.

In 2024, he completed a PhD in History of Societies, Institutions and Thought at the University of Trieste, with a dissertation combining historical, economic, and political analysis. His research focused on the economic management of the Florentine Republic during the early Renaissance, offering a new perspective on the rise of the Medici family.

He is currently engaged in a postdoctoral position at the University of Cagliari, where he is studying the economic and accounting practices of a Tuscan abbey (Badia a Settimo near Florence) from the late 14th to the late 15th century.

Over the course of his academic career, he has published more than twenty scholarly articles and is the author of two volumes on collections of arms and armor.

More information: https://unica.academia.edu/SimonePicchianti

Universität zu Köln

A spectacle of spirits: the American performances of Eusapia Palladino

2013-2014: Fall

Simone Natale completed his Ph.D. at the University of Torino in 2011. His work focuses on issues of media, religion, visual studies, and material culture. He has taught and researched in several university and research centers in Germany, Italy, and Canada, and has been the recipient of fellowships awarded by the Humboldt Foundation, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and the National Museum of Cinema of Turin. His writings have been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Media History, History of Photography, Early Popular Visual Culture, Celebrity Studies, the Canadian Journal of Communication, and the European Journal of American Culture. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Spectacular Supernatural: Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Show Business, which draws on his Ph.D. dissertation. Applying frameworks and theories from the field of material religion to film and media studies, this book will explore how beliefs in the supernatural interacted with entertainment practices and with the rise of modern show business, from the origins of the spiritualist movement in the middle nineteenth century to the early development of cinema.

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Palazzeschi and the domain of the comic genre in early twentieth-century avant-garde European literature

2006-2007

Simone Magherini was born in Florence on 7th September 1964. He graduated with Gino Tellini in 1990, examined on a thesis about «Frammenti lirici» by Clemente Rebora. On February 1991, he was awarded "Premio Palazzeschi", published by the Faculty of Humanities of Florence for Theses, deserving the highest praise, dedicated to the «study of our literature and our language». Since 1992 he carries out his research work at the Department of Italianistica of the University of Florence.
On February 2004 he won the competitive examination for researchers in Italian Literature at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Florence.
He devotes himself particularly to archives research, to the study of literary letters and the poetry of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and to the informatics applications in the Humanities field.
He edited the first volume of the Moretti-Palazzeschi Letters, 1904-1925 (Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1999, pp. 540); and, with Gloria Manghetti, a biography of Palazzeschi in images: Scherzi di gioventù e d'altre età. Album Palazzeschi 1885-1974 (Firenze, Pagliai Polistampa, 2001, pp. 302); and the catalogue of the Biblioteca di Aldo Palazzeschi (Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004, pp. 532). On the occasion of congresses and study days, he dedicated several documentary exhibitions and an audiovisual collection of interviews recovered from the Archive of Rai Teche (Aldo Palazzeschi si legge. .e si racconta) to the Florentine writer.
On the Informatics side he projected and took part in the realization of the Digital Archive of Fondo Palazzeschi; of the Bibliografia leopardiana informatizzata in Italia e all'estero (1815-1999), edited by Enrico Ghidetti; and of AD900 (Digital Archive of Italian Literary Twentieth Century), a modern and useful digital built-in archive for on-line access to the cataloguing cards and to the facsimile reproduction of the papers of Italian poets and writers (letters, manuscripts, bibliographic records, iconographic and audiovisual material), coming from several archival sources (Palazzeschi's Archive of Florence, Twentieth Century Liguria's Archive of Genoa, Gozzano-Pavese's Archive of Turin), on which linguistic research is possible.
He is member of the editorial staff of the «Studi italiani» review (edited by Riccardo Bruscagli, Giuseppe Nicoletti, Gino Tellini); member of the board of directors of the "Aldo Palazzeschi" Study Center; member of the Scientific Council of the "Primo Conti" Foundation and of the teaching staff Council of the Doctoral International School in Italianistica; he is President of the "Vittorio e Piero Alinari" Foundation.

Università di Genova

A Transnational History of Italian Cuisine: Icon of Diasporic Identity, Cultural Commodity in the Global Marketplace

2003-2004: Spring

Simone Cinotto received a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Genoa (2000). He is a member of the "Piero Bairati" Center for Euro-American Studies at the University of Turin. His research interests include immigration and ethnic history, food history, and history and film. He is the author of Una famiglia che mangia insieme: cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920-1940 [A Family That Eats Together: Food and Ethnicity in the Italian American Community of New York City, 1920-1940], Turin, 2001, and the editor of Colture e culture del riso: una prospettiva storica [Rice Cultures in Historical Perspective], Vercelli, 2002. As a fellow of the Fondazione Bellonci in Rome, he is working on Luchino Visconti's film Rocco and His Brothers and its representation of Italian internal migrations in the 1950s-1960s. He is also coordinating a local history project on emigration from a Northeastern Piedmont community in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

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).

Università di Venezia

Ca' Foscari

Political Theologies and Political Religions in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s

2005-2006

Simon Levis-Sullam (Venezia 1974) received a PhD in European Social History from the University of Venice, Ca' Foscari. His main fields of interest are the history of ideas in Europe between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, with a particular focus on nationalisms and fascisms; the history of the Jews and of Anti-Semitism; the history of the Holocaust. He has studied at the University of Venice, Ca' Foscari, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and he has been a fellow of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin. He is the author of Una Comunità Immaginata: Gli Ebrei a Venezia, 1900-1938 (Unicopli: Milan 2001), and the editor of Risorgimento Italiano e Religioni Politiche (special issue of "Società e Storia", 2004, 106). He is also the editor, with M. Cattaruzza, M. Flores and E. Traverso, of an international Storia della Shoah, the first volume of which was published by UTET (Turin) in October 2005. He is working on a book on the relationship between the Risorgimento and Fascism through the influence of Mazzini. At the Italian Academy, this year, he is initiating a new research project on "political theologies" in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, based on a comparison between Giovanni Gentile and Carl Schmitt, and aimed at the study of the long-term influence of "political romanticism" in the rise of fascisms in Europe.

Università Tor Vergata di Roma

Communism and anti-communism in Italy: 1970s-1980s

2008-2009: Fall

Silvio Pons is Professor of East European History at Rome University "Tor Vergata" (Rome II). He is the author of Stalin and the Inevitable War 1936-41 (Frank Cass, London 2002) and recently of Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino, 2006). He is editor of the following volumes: The Cominform. Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949, Fondazione Feltrinelli, Annali, XXX (Milan, 1994); (with F. Gori), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943-53 (Macmillan, London 1996); (with A. Romano), Russia in the Age of Wars 1914-1945 (Feltrinelli, Milan, 2000); (with Federico Romero), Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War (Frank Cass, London 2005); (with Robert Service), Dizionario del comunismo, 2 vols. (Einaudi, Turin 2006-2007).
His main research interests are focused on the history of the Cold War. He is currently writing a book on the history of international Communism and working on a project about the political culture of Italian Communism in the last decades of its life.

Università di Teramo

Professionals of rehabilitation: UNRRA officers in postwar Europe

2009-2010: Fall

Silvia Salvatici specializes in Modern history with particular emphases on individual and collective memories in post-war societies, women refugees in the 20th century, gender and human rights, and European displaced persons in the aftermath of WWII. She received a PhD in Historical Sciences from the International Post-graduate School of Social Sciences of San Marino University and a PhD in Family and Gender History from the University of Naples "L'Orientale." Among her most recent publications are "Public Memory, Gender and National Identity in Post-War Kosovo: The Albanian Community," in Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (eds), Oral History and Public Memories, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2008; "Le Gouvernement anglais et les femmes réfugiées d'Europe après la Deuxième guerre mondiale," in Mouvement social, Fall 2008; Senza casa e senza paese. Profughi europei nel secondo dopoguerra, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008. Dr. Salvatici is lecturer in modern history at the University of Teramo (Italy) where she teaches Women's and Gender History. Since 2008 she has been Honorary Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology of Birkbeck College. During her time at the Italian Academy she will be working on a new research project with the title "Professionals of Rehabilitation. UNRRA Officers in Postwar Europe". With this project she will investigate the gendered re/construction of relief work in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which represents an unwritten chapter in the history of the emergence of welfare, humanitarianism and internationalism during European reconstruction.

Università di Torino

Highlighting child poverty: within and beyond Italy's Parliamentary Inquiry on Misery in the 1950s

2018-2019: Spring

Fordham University

Remaking the Italians: The Politics of National Character from the Risorgimento to the "Second Republic", c. 1815-2000

2002-2003

Silvana Patriarca received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and has taught at Columbia University, the University of Florida, and Fordham University, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of History. She specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Italy and is the author of Numbers and Nationhood. Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge UP), a study of the relationships between statistical knowledge, liberal ideology and the making of the nation state. At the Italian Academy she is completing a book on the politics of the discourse of Italian national character.

Fordham University

The color of the Republic: “race” and the boundaries of the nation in post-Fascist Italy

2016-2017: Fall

Silvana Patriarca received her laurea at the University of Turin and her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Florida, and is currently a professor in the Department of History of Fordham University. She specializes in the history of modern Italy and her research has ranged from the social history of industrialization to the intellectual and political history of statistics to the cultural history of nationalism and the construction of national identities in their intersection with gender and “race.” The author of the award-winning Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press) and of Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge University Press), she has co-edited (with Lucy Riall) The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan). An essay based on her current research and entitled “Fear of Small Numbers: ‘Brown Babies’ in Postwar Italy” was recently published in the journal Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ’900. She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (North Carolina) and at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in Paris. 

Web page: http://www.fordham.edu/info/20762/faculty/6421/silvana_patriarca%0A

Columbia University (U.S.A.)

The neurobiology of decision-making and the roots of conceptualization and abstraction

2020-2021: Fall

I trained as a physician at Bangalore Medical College, India and obtained my PhD from the University of Utah in the laboratory of Alessandra Angelucci. In my graduate work, I studied the neural mechanisms of how surrounding context influences the visual perception of objects and scenes. I am currently a research scientist in the laboratory of Michael Shadlen at Columbia University where I study how brains create abstract representations and use them to generate endlessly flexible behavior. I also study how such computations are affected in neurological and psychiatric disorders. 

An important result of my research is that abstract representations in the brain are constrained by how we intend to act on them. In my tenure at the Academy, I plan to explore how the intentional architecture of our brain can influence and constrain our imagination.

Web page: https://www.shushruth.net/

University of Virginia

Shantytowns and intangible heritage across the Mediterranean preservation in an era of planetary urbanization

2018-2019: Fall

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Sheila Crane is associate professor and chair of the Architectural History Department at the University of Virginia. Her research examines the history and theory of modern architecture and urbanism, with a particular interest in cities in France, North Africa and the Mediterranean region. Her book Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) received the 2013 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Recent essays have appeared in City and Society, Space and Culture, and The Journal of Architecture, as well as in edited volumes, including Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, edited by Kenny Cupers (Routledge, 2013) and Otherwise Occupied: Bashir Makhoul, Aissa Deebi, edited by Ryan Bishop and Gordon Hon (Palestinian Art Court-al Hoash, 2013). Her current book project, Inventing Informality, traces the emergence and migrations of the bidonville (shantytown) between the Maghreb and France, from the late 1920s through the 1970s. With reference to constructed landscapes and land rights, maps and urban plans, administrative records and sociological surveys, oral histories and literary descriptions, the bidonville is examined as an urban landscape, object of reengineering, site of knowledge production, and place of socio-spatial reinvention by residents. She is currently the book reviews editor for Europe, Africa, and Asia from 1750 for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Web page: https://www.arch.virginia.edu/people/sheila-crane

Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften

Austria

Radical Natural Philosophy, Politics and Culture in Late Sixteenth Century Naples. The Cases of Bernardino Telesio, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista della Porta

2005-2006

Sergius Kodera received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1994. Since then he has been teaching history of Renaissance Philosophy at the same university. Form 1994 to 1997 he was a Frances Yates and Erwin Schroedinger Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. He received his Habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2004; during this year he was research fellow at the IFK in Vienna. Kodera has published on and/or translated works by Leone Ebreo, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino and Giambattista della Porta. Currently, he is working on a book exploring the intellectual culture of late sixteenth century Naples.

Luiss Guido Carli

Roma

Cultural identity and human rights

2006-2007

Sebastiano Maffettone is Full Professor in Political Philosophy at Luiss University, Rome; Director of the Centro di Studi e Ricerche sui Diritti Umani (CERSDU), Rome; President of "Humanity," a group that works on human rights and public policy; (first) President of the SIFP (Società italiana di filosofia politica); Director of the journal "Filosofia e questioni pubbliche"; and Member of the Ethical Committee of Capitalia. Outside of Italy, he has been a Visiting Professor at the School of Law, New York University; at Tufts University (Boston); at the Maison Sciences de l'Homme, Paris; at Boston College (Boston); and at Harvard University. He has also been a Senior Fellow in the Program in Ethics and Professions, Harvard University.
His areas of interest are political philosophy (in particular: theories of justice, international political philosophy, liberalism, human rights), ethics (normative ethics and applied ethics), bioethics, business ethics, philosophy of international relations, environmental ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, history of philosophy (in particular: Greek philosophy, Kant, Hegel), and analytic and continental philosophy.
Professor Maffettone is the author of almost 300 hundred scientific papers and 12 books in the area of moral, political and social philosophy. Among the volumes are Valori comuni (il Saggiatore), Ermeneutica e scelta collettiva (Guida), Le ragioni degli altri (il Saggiatore), I fondamenti del liberalismo (Laterza, with Ronald Dworkin), Il valore della vita (Mondadori), Etica pubblica (il Saggiatore), and La pensabilità del mondo (il Saggiatore 2006).

Meyer + Partner Architects (Germany)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Transformation of the villa: the example of the Thieleck estate in Berlin (1927–1931)

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Sebastian Meyer-von Köckritz is a practicing architect based in Berlin. After graduating, he worked in London and returned to Berlin in 1992 to set up his own practice.

He specializes in the conversion of historic buildings. In 2005, he was invited by the Bundesbauministerium to become the lead project manager and coordinator for the general refurbishment of the Bode Museum in Berlin, with the task of complying with both the legal requirements for listed buildings in Germany and the UNESCO World Heritage framework. Since the completion of this project in 2009, his focus has been on the conservation of historic buildings, in particular in the Thielecksiedlung in Berlin Dahlem.

From 2012 to 2020 he was responsible for the refurbishment of the partly listed buildings of the German Embassy in London. 

In 2022, he wrote a report on the possible renovation of the Federal Environment Agency's headquarters in Berlin, built in 1910.

Columbia University

Using nanotechnology to explore and understand inks in ancient manuscripts

2014-2015: Fall and Spring

Co-sponsored by Columbia's Center for Integrated Science and Engineering, Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center Program.

I received an undergraduate degree in Applied Physics from Columbia University. During that time I worked in an optics lab studying the properties of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, with Raman spectroscopy. I went on to explore the interaction of hydrogen on graphene for hydrogen storage during my PhD studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. Currently, I am at Columbia University as a postdoc using mirco-Raman spectroscopy to study the pigments of ancient manuscripts. The goal is to understand the evolution of black ink in antiquity and hopefully develop a new non-destructive technique for determining the age of these documents.
http://cise.columbia.edu/ancient-ink-laboratory/research-team

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).

https://uniroma1.academia.edu/SaraBova

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

Former Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Distinguished Visiting Fellow in connection with the Academy's International Observatory for Cultural Heritage

2016-2017: Spring

Salvatore Settis is the former Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (1994–1999) and of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1999–2010), where he also taught Classical Archaeology and Art History. He was Warburg Professor at the University of Hamburg (1991) and delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2000), the A.W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2001), and the Lectures of the Cátedra del Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2010-11). He was also appointed as Professor of the Borromini Chair at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland (2014-2015), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Institut de France, the American Philosophical Society, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, and of the Academies of Sciences in Berlin, Munich, Brussels, and Turin. He currently chairs the Scientific Council of the Musée du Louvre. Settis’ research interests focus on ancient and Renaissance art history, and his numerous publications include If Venice Dies (2016), Azione popolare: Cittadini per il bene comune (2012), Artisti e committenti fra Quattro e Cinquecento (2010), and The Future of the Classical (2006). He was the editor of The Classical Tradition (with Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 2010), I Greci. Storia, arte, cultura, società, vols. 1–6 (1995–2002), Memoria dell’Antico nell’arte italiana, vols. 1–3 (1984–86), and is the general editor of the series Mirabilia Italiae. For his interest in the preservation of landscape and cultural heritage, Settis has been Chair of Italy’s High Council for Cultural Heritage and Landscape (2007–2009). He has been awarded two honorary degrees in Law by the University of Padua (2007) and the University of Rome Tor Vergata (2008), and one in Architecture by the University of Reggio Calabria (2013).

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/

Università di Bologna

Byzantium, Italy and the Western Mediterranean in the seventh century: social transformations and cultural identities

2010-2011: Spring

Salvatore Cosentino is Professor of Byzantine Civilization at the University of Bologna. He began his research activity in the field of the Venetokratia by studying the social and economic system of the feudum in Venetian Crete (Aspetti e problemi del feudo veneto-cretese, Bologna 1987). He has studied the social history of late antique and early Byzantine Italy on which he wrote extensively (Prosopografia dell'Italia bizantina, 3 vols. Bologna 1996-2010; Storia arte e archeologia della Sardegna bizantina, Cagliari 2002; Storia dell'Italia bizantina, Bologna 2008). He interested also in the history of Byzantine navy and Byzantine military literature. Presently, he is working on social and economic aspects of the seventh century.

Visiting Scholar

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (Italy)

From destruction to construction: natural catastrophes and art-making in sixteenth-century Bologna

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Saida Bondini is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut. In 2021, she received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, with a dissertation entitled Urban and Social Spaces. Art, Architecture, and Family Patronage in Bologna (c. 1470–1520).

Saida has been the recipient of fellowships and internships from international institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014); the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2015); and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2020–2021). During her doctoral studies, she held the position of Teaching Assistant in the Renaissance Department and Associate Lecturer in Early Modern Art at the Courtauld Institute.

Her current postdoctoral research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, explores the interdependence of natural disasters and art making in the sixteenth century, with an emphasis on the Italian territory.

Koya University

Keeping memory: vernacular architecture in Iraqi Kurdistan

2018-2019: Fall

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

An assistant professor in the Department of Architectural Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at Koya University in Iraqi Kurdistan, Sahar has worked in this department since 2008, teaching classes in the history of architecture and conservation & rehabilitation as well as the Urban Design Studio.
She received her B.Sc. in Architectural Engineering (1997) and M.Sc. in Urban Design (2005) from the University of Technology - Iraq, and her Ph.D. in Urban Conservation (2011) from the University of Baghdad - Iraq.
She has since 2012 led a campaign to document the surviving heritage architectural features of Koya and of other nearby Iraqi Kurdish old towns, with her colleagues and students.
In 2009 she had a 3-month scholarship at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany, via the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); in 2016 she was an awardee of the 2016 SAH-Getty international program grant (presented by the Society of Architectural Historians and the Getty Foundation).
She has been a member of the Iraqi Engineers Union (IEU) since 1997; a consultant architect since 2014; and a member of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) since 2015.
Her participation in conferences and publications reflects her research interests in conservation, urban design, and the history of architecture.

Web page: https://sites.google.com/a/koyauniversity.org/sahar-basil/

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

In Search of Origins: Making Etruscans into Italics and Italics into Italians

2016-2017: Fall

Sabina Loriga is Professor in History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She leads the International Workshop on the Public Uses of the Past, part of the “Laboratoire d’excellence” TEPSIS: Transformation of the State, Politicization of Society, Institutionalization of Social Issues. She is also editor of the journal Passés Futurs.

Her research focuses on the relationships between history and biography, the construction of historical time, and public uses of the past. Notable publications include: Le petit x. De la biographie à l’histoire (Paris, Seuil, 2010); Soldats. Un laboratoire disciplinaire: l’armée piémontaise au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Belles Lettres, 2007); La juste mémoire. Lectures autour de Paul Ricœur (Geneva, Labor et Fides, 2006, in collaboration with Olivier Abel et al.)

Web page: http://gehm.ehess.fr/index.php?3047

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)

Rethinking the origins of the Vatican Ethnological Museum

2022-2023: Fall

Sabina Brevaglieri is lecturer (wiss. Mitarbeiterin) at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She is an Early modern historian (PhD University of Florence), with a significant background in art history (Sapienza Università di Roma). She has been a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and Marie Curie Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, where she teaches courses in the history of knowledge. She was also awarded with further international fellowships in Münster, Wolfenbüttel, Paris, and Washington DC.

She is a specialist in early modern Rome as a site of knowledge production and a complex communicative space where many different agencies interplayed with Papal universalistic claims. She is the author of the 2019 book Natural desiderio di sapere: Roma barocca fra vecchi e nuovi mondi, Roma, Viella, La Corte dei Papi, 2019 (NdS). The book provides an innovative cultural biography of the so-called Mexican Treasury (Rome, 1651). It radically rethinks the writing of the well-known natural history of the new worlds and argues for Lincean Academy dynamics as thoroughly entangled with the vibrant Baroque Rome. Thus, NdS investigates interplays between nature and art, indigenous craftsmanship and artisanal industry, factional dynamics, confessional negotiations and competing searches for legitimation continuously redefining the shifting de-centrality of the Papal city. In addition, she edited the forthcoming Quaderni Storici special issue Missionary collecting (2022, 1). The issue addresses missionary engagement with indigenous artefacts and their preservation through time, tracing back to the early 16th century and spanning missionary museums between the 19th and 20th centuries. This work investigates the complex physical mobility and cultural transformations of artefacts and explores practices of attention, selection, accumulation, and monopolization, which encompass violence, domination, creative resistance, competing agencies, and asymmetric negotiations within the colonial spaces.

At the Italian Academy, she explores the 17th century origins of the Vatican Ethnological Museum. Her project investigates the complex entanglements of indigenous claims, missionary agencies, and Papal universalistic self-legitimation which shaped artefacts’ lives. Their entrapment in mobile collectives of actors, papers and objects will be explored, paying attention to experimental transactions, creative misunderstandings, and continuous frictions. The project engages with heritage performance and dynamics of sedimentation, as well as competing practices of patrimonializations. Against this background, a call for an interdisciplinary reflection on a tentatively defined artefact "right to endure" will be launched.
 

Brown University

Feeding Rome: food, architecture, and urbanism during Fascism

2018-2019: Spring

Ruth Lo is Visiting Lecturer in the Urban Studies Program at Brown University. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, and her MA in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University. She was a Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome from 2013 to 2015. Her research is in the environmental humanities and integrates the study of science and technology to analyze the use of the built environment to manage humans and resources. 

Her book project, Landscape of Control: Food, Eugenics, and the Built Environment in Fascist Italy, is an interdisciplinary study on the built environment through an examination of its intersections with nature, culture, politics, science, and technology. Connecting food to modern Italian discourses of social and racial hygiene, she explores the reciprocal relationship between agricultural breeding and medical genetics to analyze the architecture and landscape of Italy and Italian East Africa. These sites range from reclaimed farmlands to an agricultural experiment station, granaries and milk plants to market halls.

Università degli Studi di Perugia

The Confessions of Hamlet

2002-2003

Rosanna Camerlingo is a full professor of English at the University of Perugia. She obtained her Ph.D in Comparative Literature at New York University and is currently director of the graduate program in Comparative Literature in Perugia. She has focused on the English and Italian Renaissance, specifically on the literature, religion, and philosophy of the period. She has published on Christopher Marlowe and Giordano Bruno. Presently she is working on Shakespeare and religion.

Università di Perugia

Machiavelli's reception on the theatrical and political scene of Elizabethan England: the role of Alberico Gentili

2014-2015: Fall

Professor Rosanna Camerlingo teaches English Literature at the University of Perugia. She obtained a Phd in Comparative Literature at New York University and was a fellow of the Italian Academy in New York in the academic year 2002-2003. She teaches and studies Renaisance Literature, with an emphasis on the relationship between religion, political thinking and literature. She has written books on Philip Sidney and the Italian Renaissance literature; on the influence of Giordano Bruno's philosophy on Christopher Marlowe's theatre; and many articles on Shakespeare's Sonnets and Renaissance poetry. Her latest book on the realationship between treatises on confession and Shakespeare's tragedies, Crimini e Peccati. La confessione al tempo di Amleto, will be published in the fall of 2014.

Web page: http//www.unipg.it/pagina-personale?matricola=005477

Università degli Studi di Messina

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Are antidepressant effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation mediated by stem cells?

2007-2008: Fall & Spring

Rosalia Crupi received her Ph.D. in Clinical Neurosciences at the Medical School of the University of Messina after taking a degree in Biological Sciences in 2003 at the same university with a thesis entitled "Cytotoxicity effect of nemathocyste Aiptasia mutabilis capsular fluid on VERO and HEP-2 cells." She currently collaborates as a researcher at CUNY's Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education.

The Graduate Center - City University of New York

Flashbacks and eclipses in Italian art in the 1960s

2013-2014: Spring

Romy Golan is professor of 20th century art at the Graduate Center and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars and Muralnomad: the Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927-1957 --both published Yale University Press in 1995 and 2009. Her recent publications include "Flashbacks/Eclipses in Italian Art of the 1960s" Grey Room 49 (Fall 2012) and she is currently completing a book with that title.

Emory University

The rise of Italian Fascism (1919-1922): a quantitative narrative analysis

2013-2014: Fall

Roberto Franzosi (BA in Literature, University of Genoa; PhD in Sociology, Johns Hopkins University) is professor of Sociology and Linguistics at Emory University. His main substantive interest has been in social protest, with projects on Italian strikes (see The Puzzle of Strikes, Cambridge University Press, 1994) and two current projects on the rise of Italian fascism (1919-22) and on lynchings in Georgia (1875-1930) that have led to the publication of several journal articles. Franzosi has had a long-standing methodological interest in issues of language and measurement of meaning in texts (narrative texts, in particular), with several journal articles published and three books From Words to Number (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Content Analysis (Sage, 2008), and Quantitative Narrative Analysis (Sage, 2010). He is currently working on the completion of the book Trilogy of Rhetoric on the rhetorical roots of three social science approaches to text: content analysis, frame analysis, and quantitative narrative analysis (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Università degli Studi di Bologna

Canon-making and Cultural Memory. Political Thought in Italy after 1945

2002-2003

Spring

Roberto Farneti (laurea in 'Filosofia'; dottorato di ricerca in 'Storia delle dottrine politiche') is a research fellow (assegnista di ricerca) in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bologna, specializing in political philosophy and the history of modern political thought. He has visited several foreign academic institutions as a research fellow (the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt a. M., Brown University, etc.) and has been a visiting fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He has also taught Political Philosophy at the ECLA in Berlin during the summer semester of 2002. Among his most recent publications is the article "The 'Mythical Foundation' of the State: Leviathan in Emblematic Context," in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol. 82, 2001, and the book "Il canone moderno. Filosofia politica e genealogia" (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). At the Italian Academy he will seek to expand on the process of 'canon-formation' in Italy after 1945, tracking down the main intellectual lineages through which the making of a liberal political identity in Italy has been conveyed.

Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris

Pictorial representations of shadows: visual cognition and art history

2010-2011: Fall

Roberto Casati is a tenured senior researcher with the French CNRS at the Ecole Normale SupÉrieure in Paris. He has taught at several universities in Europe and US. He is the co-author of Holes (with Achille Varzi; MIT Press) and the author of The Discovery of the Shadow (Knopf), translated in 8 languages. He is working, with psychologist Vittorio Girotto, on a book on Creative Solutions, and is one of the participants in the Liquid Publications project. At the Italian Academy he will work on a book on the cognitive aspects of the artistic representations of shadows.

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS; France)

Cognitive reconciliation of alien environments: a study of marine representations

2023–2024: Spring

Roberto Casati, Senior Researcher of CNRS, Professor at EHESS, and Director of the Jean Nicod Institute of ENS/EHESS in Paris (one of the leading research centers in cognitive science) works currently on navigation, the ocean, and the understanding of biodiversity. He is the author of 120 research papers and book chapters on perception, spatial representation and the use of maps and images, as well as of ten books, some of which have been translated in many languages. His seminal work on Digital Colonialism has spurred a large debate on the use of technology in schools. The Cognitive Life of Maps will be published in 2023 by MIT Press; he is the editor of the collection The Sailing Mind (Springer, 2022). His latest book is Oceano (Einaudi, 2022; French translation La philosophie de l’Océan, PUF 2022).

École Normale Supérieure; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Heterogeneous cognition: how cognitive artifacts shape the mind

2018-2019: Spring

Roberto Casati, senior researcher with the French CNRS and professor at EHESS, is currently the director of Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. A philosopher of the cognitive sciences, he has made contributions to the study of visual and auditory objects and of spatial representation. His last book, the visual World of Shadows, with Patrick Cavanagh, will be published in 2019 with MIT Press. His work on Digital Colonialism has spurred debate in France and Italy. He is currently working on cognitive artifacts and spatial disorientation. 

Web page: http://www.shadowes.org/home/

Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele

Public indifference to the loss of cultural heritage and identity

2016-2017: Spring

Roberta De Monticelli is Full Professor for Philosophy of Personhood at San Raffaele University, Milan, and Director of PERSONA (Research Centre in Phenomenology and Sciences of the Person, http://www.unisr.it/ - see also its forum, Phenomenology Lab, www.phenomenologylab.eu/) 

She is currently Chief Editor of “Phenomenology and Mind” – The Online Journal of PERSONA (http://www.phenomenologyandmind.eu/). From 1989 to 2004 she was Full Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the Université de Genève. Her permanent domains of research are defined by a Phenomenological approach to Mind and Personhood: Norms and Values – Feeling/Emotions – Will/Decisions – Personal Identity – Embodied Cognition. Her long term research aims at a cognitive foundation of practical reason, needed to counteract mainstream ethical scepticism and axiological disenchantment, while rejecting both Constructivism and Metaphysical Realism as unsatisfactory alternatives in current meta-ethical debate. Yet the comprehensive frame of this research is not Moral Philosophy, but a theory of Personhood, including moral as well as any other value-guided type of agency, and integrating emotional sensibility as an ultimate source of evidence and justification for value judgments of very different sort. At the Italian Academy she will develop her program of a cognitive foundation of value judgments by considering the paradigmatic example of beauty and its emotional perception, focusing on a new and widespread type of practical and axiological scepticism, as exemplified by public indifference (or even insensitivity) to the loss of cultural heritage and identity.

Web page: http://www.unisr.it/en/k-teacher/demonticelli-roberta/

Università degli Studi di Bologna

Iconographies of memory: the geopolitics of "fantasy coffins"

2007-2008

Roberta Bonetti teaches History of Anthropology at University of Bologna; Faculty Arts and Humanities, 2nd Level Degree Course in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology. She graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in Anthropology. In 2006 she had a Ph.D. degree in "Religious Studies: Social Sciences and Historical Studies of Religions" and in "Anthropologie sociale, ethnographie et etnologie", a joint program of the University of Bologna and l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris. Her dissertation, entitled Oggetti funerari dell'Africa contemporanea. Modalità di produzione, uso e rappresentazione nei musei etnografici, discusses contemporary art of South Ghana and its circulation and representation in the western world.
She has extensive work experience in the field of museum anthropology, in particular that of Africa.
From 1996-2002 she conceived and curated a series of exhibitions, educational courses, and catalogues. She has conducted research in African and Italian museums, run university seminars on the topic of museum anthropology and anthropology of art.
Two related research interests have emerged and developed in her work as museum ethnographer: On the one hand, the processes involved in the construction of "traditional" and contemporary art; and on the other, the communicative strategies and cognitive processes of reception employed by exhibitions and social actors respectively. More generally, she is interested in the complex relations between the museum (and art) world and society, which are multidimensional and changing spaces. At the moment, she is involved in exhibition experiments in particular in the field of museum education, concentrating on cognitive processes involved in reading images.

Leiden University

Demons in ancient Egypt during the Late and Greco-Roman Periods

2008-2009

Rita Lucarelli was born on the 23rd of August, 1972, in Ostuni, Italy. From 1992 to 1996 she studied at the University of Naples "L'Orientale," where she took her degree in Classical Languages and Egyptology with a thesis entitled "Chapter 178 of the Book of the Dead." From 1999 to 2003 she was attached to the Research School CNWS of Leiden University (the Netherlands) with a Ph.D. grant. Her Ph.D. thesis was published in 2006 as The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen. Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. Currently she has a post-doc position at the University of Bonn (Germany), supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and concerning research on demons in magical and funerary papyri of the Pharaonic period. Her areas of expertise include religion, magic and demonology in ancient Egypt.

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/

Università di Milano-Bicocca

Visiting Senior Fellow

Cultural and cognitive aspects of tacit knowledge in technology transfer between academic and industrial laboratories

2008-2009: Spring

Riccardo Viale obtained a degree in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Turin with a thesis on "The Logical Models of Schizophrenic Thought." Afterwards, at Oxford, he developed interests in epistemology and cognitive science and in particular in the cognitive theory of science. He is now full professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of Milano-Bicocca and of cognitive economics at the Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione di Roma. He is President of the Rosselli Foundation (Turin) and editor in chief of Mind & Society - Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences (Springer). 

He has been a faculty member and a visiting fellow at various universities, among them Bocconi (Milan); Oxford; Fribourg; Aix-en-Provence; Rice (Houston); California (Santa Barbara); and Federal (Rio de Janeiro). 

In the last twenty years his areas of interest and research have been: experimental epistemology (category based induction, probabilistic reasoning, vague predicates, causal reasoning, tacit knowledge, anthropological and developmental differences in cognition); philosophy of science (deductive reasoning and falsification, scientific methodological values and rationality, cognitive theory of science); methodology of social science (philosophy of mind of the social actor, cognitive foundation of social action, social rationality); social epistemology (truth and cognitive reliability, epistemological values in risk assessment, scientometrics and scientific governance); cognitive economics (biases in decision making, economic rationality and duality of mind, technological knowledge); research and innovation policy (technology transfer, university-industry relations, regional innovation systems, triple helix). 

He has published several books and many articles in various journals, among them: Mind & Language, Memory and Cognition, Foundation of Science, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Critical Sociology, Mind & Society, Industrial and Corporate Change, Science and Public Policy. 

His current research concerns the different cognitive styles between academic and industrial researchers and on how the diverse features of tacit knowledge shape the transfer of technology.

Print Quarterly (UK)

Natale Bonifacio’s Allusioni for Pope Gregory XIII, 1582–1588

2024–2025: Fall

Rhoda Eitel-Porter is an art historian and editor of the journal Print Quarterly. She previously worked for eleven years at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, ultimately as head of the department of drawings and prints. Prior to this, she was special assistant at the British Museum, London. She continues to lead the curating prints seminars offered by Print Quarterly and funded by the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project.

Rhoda is a specialist in Italian sixteenth-century drawings and prints, although her research interests also extend to late twentieth-century American and German art. Her Ph.D. on the Roman mannerist draughtsman and painter Cesare Nebbia was published in 2009, and she co-authored Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection (2010) and Italian Renaissance Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum (2019). Recent publications include articles on drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy; Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg; and Lelio Orsi, as well as the essays “Crosshatched: Printmaking, Book Illustration and Drawing in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome,” in: La Scintilla Divina. Il disegno a Roma tra Cinque e Seicento, edited by S. Albl and M. S. Bolzoni (2020) and “The Morgan Dante Drawings in Context: Book Illustrations and Drawings,” in: Immaginare La Commedia, edited by C. Perna (2022).

Website: independent.academia.edu/RhodaEitelPorter

Università di Roma La Sapienza

Possessions and reputation in 17th-century Rome

2011-2012: Fall

A graduate of La Sapienza Università di Roma, Renata Ago has always taught early modern history, first as a "ricercatore" at La Sapienza, then as a "professore associato" at the University of Cagliari and finally as a "professore ordinario" at La Sapienza.

During this time she has also been fellow or visiting professor in several institutions: in 1997/98 she was Jean Monnet fellow at the European University Institute in Florence; in 1990 and again in 2008 visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; in 2010 visiting professor at the Stanford University. She has been member of the editorial board of different academic journals like Memoria. Rivista di storia delle donne, Continuity & Change, Melanges de l'Ecole Française de Rome and Quaderni storici (of which she is currently the Director).

She participates in the Advisory Committee del "Accademia di San Luca Project," carried on by the CASVA (Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts) in Washington, and from 2008 to 2010 she was a member of the "Conseil scientifique" and the "Conseil d'administration" of the Ecole Française de Rome.

Her scientific interests are specifically devoted to the social history of early modern times. Within this framework she has worked on rural communities and feudality in 16th to 18th centuries, on which she has written several essays and two books (Un feudo esemplare. Immobilismo padronale e astuzia contadina nel Lazio del '700, Fasano, Schena, 1988; and La feudalità nell'età moderna, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1994).

She has also worked on family and gender history, and on the relationship between social exchanges, economic practices and institutions, on which she has edited two special issues of Quaderni storici (nn. 88 and 101) and written the book Economia barocca. Mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del Seicento, Roma, Donzelli, 2006.

More recently her interests have shifted to issues concerning consumption and material culture, on which she edited a special issue of Quaderni storici devoted to "cultural consumption," and published the book Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento, Roma, Donzelli, 2006 (forthcoming in English translation for University of Chicago Press).

From 2009 to 2014, she is serving as the general scientific coordinator of a European project, "European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage – ENBaCH," involving eight universities from six different European countries and funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission.

Università di Pisa

Political traumas: how citizens reformulate their consciousness after the fall of a regime

2012-2013: Fall

Born in Cagliari, Sardinia, Remo Bodei taught for many years at the Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa and, most recently, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studied and taught as visiting professor in various European and American universities (Ottawa University, Toronto University, NYU, Université Libre de Bruxelles, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, Universitat de Girona, Universidad Autónoma de México). His theoretical interests were initially focused on German classical philosophy, on Idealism, and on the culture, politics and aesthetics of the "Goethezeit" and the late nineteenth century. Later they shifted to twentieth-century utopian thought and to political philosophy; and, particularly in recent decades, to the aesthetics of the ugly and of the sublime, to the theory and the history of memory, oblivion, delusion, and individuality, and the nature of passions and desires.

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library - Harvard University

Papal involvement in the spread of Greek culture in the Medieval Latin West

2011-2012: Spring

Reka Forrai holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from Central European University (Budapest). Her area of expertise is medieval intellectual history, and in particular the history of medieval translation theories and practices, with an emphasis of Greek-Latin translations. Transmission of knowledge and language are the focus of her research, as well as the question of patronage, issues of learning and power, and cultural policies of medieval institutions.
She has written both her MA and PhD dissertations on subjects pertaining to Greek-Latin translation (MA, 2000 – "The Latin Tradition of Aristotle's De Anima (1120–1270): the Relationship between Text and Commentary", PhD 2008 – "The Interpreter of the Popes. The Translation Project of Anastasius Bibliothecarius)". The results of both were published in several articles. Dr. Forrai is currently working on a large scale post-doctoral project "The involvement of the medieval papacy in the transmission of Greek learning to the West", investigating the role of the pontifical court in the process of translations from Greek to Latin from late antiquity until the late Middle Ages.

Universität Wien (Austria)

Eye-tracking and art history: discourse analysis and experimental research

2023-2024: Fall and Spring

Raphael Rosenberg is a Professor of Art History at the University of Vienna and director of the Lab for Cognitive Research in Art History (CReA). He was born and grew up in Milan, received an MA degree in Art History at the University of Munich, and a PhD at the University of Basel. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg, the Collège de France, and a chair for Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Heidelberg. He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the Academia Europaea.

His main research interests include sculpture of the Italian Renaissance, the history of abstraction in art before and around 1900, and the perception of art—from a historical and cognitive perspective. He is currently working on a book on eye movements and art history. It combines the history of text sources that used eye movements to describe artworks from the sixth century on, with a survey of recent eye-tracking experiments, and a discussion of how they advance art historical research.

Columbia University (U.S.A.)

Making and performing the Nativity scene in Italy

2020-2021: Fall

Rachel E. Boyd received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University in 2020. Her dissertation, “Invention, Collaboration, and Authorship in the Renaissance Workshop: The Della Robbia Family and Italian Glazed Terracotta Sculpture, ca. 1430–1566,” examined artistic techniques, modes of production, and transmission of craft knowledge within a four-generation workshop.

Dr. Boyd is the 2017–2020 David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; previously, she was Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. She also pursued a research exchange with the University of Glasgow’s Technical Art History Group, focusing on techniques for the examination of polychrome sculpture. Museum experience includes recent curatorial internships at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Boston, she contributed research for the 2016–2017 exhibition “Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence.”

Dr. Boyd earned her B.A. in the history of art and Italian at Yale University. She received her M.Phil. in the history of art and architecture from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Columbia University (USA)

Toward a neuro-computational account of context-dependent visual aesthetic experience

2024–2025: Fall & Spring

Pradyumna Sepulveda is a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience focusing on human decision-making. He obtained a Biotech Engineering degree and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Chile. Moving towards neuroscience, Pradyumna completed an MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College London and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Pradyumna’s research has explored decision-making and its interaction with goals and contexts. His work combines neuroscience and computational tools to understand the behavioral and neural flexibility in choices made by healthy and clinical populations. Aesthetic decisions hold a unique position and challenge since they may combine individual subjective tastes with universal concepts and commonalities. Further, the value assigned to an aesthetic experience may also be dynamic and prone to be updated by experience and personal goals. At the Academy, he will study how contextual information can affect the value of visual aesthetic experiences. For this, he will use computational models to reveal the integration of multiple visual features to construct individual preferences. He will also track attention and brain dynamics that could reveal mechanisms behind aesthetic value computation.

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.

IUAV University of Venice (Italy)

Tactile-hearing: Deaf knowledge in the Italian and American performing arts

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Piersandra Di Matteo is a performing arts theorist, curator, and dramaturg. Her research spans contemporary theatre, the politics of voice and listening, curatorial practices, and accessibility in the arts. She is a member of PerLA | Performance Epistemologies Research Lab and SSH | Sound Studies Hub at IUAV University of Venice, where she teaches Curating Performing Arts. 

Di Matteo has been invited to lecture and lead seminars at major international universities and research centers, including those in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Montréal, Amsterdam, New York City, Philadelphia, and São Paulo. 

She is widely recognized for her long-standing collaboration with Romeo Castellucci, the Italian theatre director, as his theoretical collaborator and dramaturg in prominent theatres and international festivals such as Festival d’Avignon, Ruhrtriennale, La Monnaie, Schaubühne, Wiener Festwochen, Opéra de Paris, Staatsoper Hamburg, Opéra de Lyon, Bayerische Staatsoper, Dutch National Opera, Salzburger Festspiele. 

She served as Artistic Director of Short Theatre Festival (Rome, 2021–2024) and Atlas of Transitions Biennale (Bologna, 2017–2020). 

Her recent publications include A bocca chiusa. Effetti di ventriloquio e scena contemporanea (2024), the edited volume SPEAKING NEARBY (2024), Performance + Curatela (2021, with A. Sacchi and I. Caleo) In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte (1967–1979) (2021). 

She is also editorial director of the Short Books series (NERO Editions) and Performance+ (Sossella Editore, Rome).

The Graduate Center, CUNY (U.S.A.)

Claims for the return of cultural heritage objects: Latin America

2020-2021: Fall

Pierre Losson graduated in international relations from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Strasbourg (France). He holds an MA in Arts Administration from the University of Lyon (France), an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Florida International University, and a PhD in political science from The Graduate Center, CUNY. He held several positions in French cultural centers in Mexico City (Mexico) and Lima (Peru), where he lived for ten years in total. He currently lives in New York City and was an adjunct professor at Hunter College – CUNY, Lehman College – CUNY, and Yeshiva University. His research focuses on cultural policy in Latin America; he has published peer-reviewed articles in scholarly publications (in English and Spanish), among which the International Journal of Cultural Policy, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Web page: https://pierrelosson.academia.edu/?prem_fnl_first=true

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Jewish and Christian approaches to Seneca in Late Antiquity

2013-2014: Spring

Università di Torino

The Three Envies of a Mathematician: of the pen, of the brush, and of the stick
Meetings with Remarkable Minds

2005-2006

Piergiorgio Odifreddi has studied mathematics and logic in Italy (Torino), the United States (Urbana and Los Angeles) and the Soviet Union ( Novosibirsk), and has taught it in Italy (Torino), the United States (Cornell) and in various other countries (from China to Australia). His main professional interest is the theory of computation, which studies potentialities and limitations of computers. In this field he has published the 1600 pages of "Classical Recursion Theory" (North Holland, 1989 and 1999), in two volumes. In the last decade he has devoted himself to expository works, writing for many newspapers and magazines, from "Repubblica" and "L'Espresso" to "Le Scienze", and publishing many books: among the latest are "Penna, pennello e bacchetta" (Laterza, 2005), on the relationships between mathematics and the arts, and "Il matematico impertinente" (Longanesi, 2005), a collection of essays on science and the humanities. At the Academy he is working on "Incontri con menti straordinarie," a collection of interviews with Nobel laureates and other extraordinary minds, and on "Perche' non possiamo essere cristiani," a pamphlet against the current revival of Christian fundamentalism in Italy and elsewhere.

Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail

In the shade of the laurel: music and culture in Florence, 1530-1570

2012-2013: Spring

Philippe Canguilhem is Professor of Musicology at the University of Toulouse (France). His work focuses on Italian music in the 16th century, with special emphasis on Florentine musical life. He is also interested in improvised counterpoint in the Renaissance, and is about to publish an edition and translation of Vicente Lusitano's counterpoint treatises. He has been a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2005-6).
Along with articles in international journals, he has published books on Vincenzo Galilei (2001) and Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli (2003). He is currently working on a monograph about music and culture in Florence during the principate of Cosimo I.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts

Mission Improbable: Peiresc, Barberini and the Capuchins in Ethiopia

2002-2003: Spring

Peter N. Miller is Professor of Cultural History at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. He has been Mellon Instructor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago (1993-1996), Research Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (1990-1993), and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Warburg Institute, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His books include "The Song of the Soul: Understanding 'Poppea'" (Royal Musical Association, 1992 (with Iain Fenlon), an edition of "Joseph Priestley: Political Writings" (Cambridge University Press, 1993), "Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and "Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century" (Yale University Press, 2000). He is currently working on a companion book entitled, "Peiresc's Orient: The Antiquarian Imagination", which explores the beginning of European oriental studies in the context of the seventeenth-century antiquarianization of biblical scholarship.

Syracuse University (USA)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Propelling Italy into a new century: Fiat, corporate identity, and Arte Nuova

2024–2025: Spring

Peter Clericuzio is an architectural historian based in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, specializing in modern architecture primarily in Europe and North America between 1800 and 1970, with a particular interest in Francophone countries and the connections between architecture and the decorative arts, material culture, and urbanism. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh, University of Pittsburgh, University of Tennessee, and Florida International University. His articles and essays have appeared in such publications as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Architectural History, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.

Peter is the author of Building a Regional Modernism: Art Nouveau Architecture in Nancy, 1898–1920, currently under contract with McGill-Queens University Press, and the co-author of Myth and Machine: Art and Aviation During the First World War (The Wolfsonian–FIU, 2014). He is currently completing a second monograph, A Sustainable Modernism? Le Corbusier and the French Reconstruction, 1945–52, for Lund Humphries. At The Wolfsonian–FIU, he curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions on modern architecture, design, graphic arts, and material culture, including Crisis and Commerce: World's Fairs of the 1930s (2013), The Theaters of S. Charles Lee (2013–14), and Visualizing the Information Age (2015). His work has been supported by a Fulbright Advanced Research Grant as well as grants from the Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain and the University of Edinburgh, among others.

At the Italian Academy, Peter's research will form the basis of a new monograph, tentatively titled Italian Modernism for a New Century: Fiat, Corporate Identity, and Arte Nuova, 1899–1924, which investigates the links between the nascent Italian auto industry at the dawn of the twentieth century and the Stile Liberty, or Arte Nuova, the Italian variant of the style called Art Nouveau, and their critical role, in conjunction with the staging of international expositions, in producing the first aesthetic language for Italian modernism, thus predating the more celebrated Futurist movement by at least a decade.

Hofstra University

Spectacle Culture(s): The Aesthetics of Exorbitance from the Baroque to Postmodernity

2002-2003

Pellegrino D'Acierno is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Italian Cultural Studies at Hofstra University. Educated at Columbia University, he has a long history of teaching there, having held an assistant professorship in Italian (1973-1981) and, more recently, visiting appointments in three different departments: Italian; Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and Comparative Literature and Society. He has also served as visiting professor at Cornell and New York University and as visiting critic at the graduate schools of architecture at Yale and Rice Universities and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
His publications include: "F. T. Marinetti and the Freedom of Poetry" (Scribners), "The Itinerary of the Sign: Scenes of Seeing in Giotto's Fresco Cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel" (SCI-Arc Press), "C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture" (co-editor, Princeton University Press), M. Tafuri's "The Sphere and the Labyrinth" (translator, the MIT Press), and "(In)Visible Cities: From the Postmodern Metropolis to the Cities of the Future" (co-editor, in press). He is also the editor and primary author of "The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts" (Garland Publications). In 1989 the American Academy in Rome awarded him a Prix de Rome in Post-Classical Humanistic Studies; in 1996 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete the writing of "Strange Loops: Cinema and Architecture as Spatial-Temporal Practices" (forthcoming).
The project he will undertake at the Italian Academy during the fellowship year 2002-2003 is the writing of Spectacle Culture(s): The Aesthetics of Ex-Orbitance from the Baroque to Postmodernism (working title), a post- and, in some respects, anti-Debordian study of the mechanisms and ideological effects of spectacle culture and the aesthetics of exorbitance that governs its textual productions and its attempt to spectacularize all dimensions of the life-world from the environment to self-fashioning.

Columbia University (USA)

NOMIS Foundation Fellow

New theory of visual experience

2022–2026: 12 months

While at the Italian Academy as a Fellow, Paul has also been a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience; starting in August 2024, his work here is supported by a NOMIS Foundation grant to the Italian Academy. 

Paul Linton is a neuroscientist and philosopher specialising in 3D vision. He is the author of the book The Perception and Cognition of Visual Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and the lead editor of the Royal Society volume New Approaches to 3D Vision. 

Paul received his PhD in 2021 from the Centre for Applied Vision Research at City, University of London, where his research challenged our understanding of distance perception (see the Psychonomic Society podcast “Knocking a longstanding theory of distance perception”), and was also part of the DeepFocus team at Meta Reality Labs. 

At the Italian Academy he has developed new theories of Visual Scale (the perceived size and distance of scenes and objects) and Visual Shape (the perceived 3D geometry of scenes and objects), now published in his article “Minimal Theory of 3D Vision: New Approach to Visual Scale and Visual Shape” (2023), and at the Vision Sciences Society (2024) he presented the “Linton Stereo Illusion”, a new way of investigating human stereo vision.

For more details on his work please see https://linton.vision.

Università di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale

Landscape in Rome during the second half of the sixteenth century: from drawing to painting

2013-2014: Spring

Patrizia Tosini graduated in 1991 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza," where she attended a post-graduate program in Medieval and Modern Art History in 1991-1993. She obtained her Ph.D. in Art History in 1998.
In 1994-1995 she was awarded research grants by the University of Padua, and by the British Academy and the Accademia dei Lincei, to study at Warwick University, at the Courtauld Institute, and the Witt Library in London.
During the 1990s she worked as an archivist at the Archivio di Stato di Roma and as a museum curator in Modena (Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Modena e Reggio Emilia).
Since 2001 she has taught Renaissance and Baroque Art History at the University of Viterbo and the University of Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale. In 2005 she became Assistant Professor at the University of Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale. In Fall 2011 she was the Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the CASVA.
Her research interests focus on the visual arts of the late Renaissance in central Italy, mainly on fresco decoration in Roman buildings and, more generally, on the artistic patronage of the Counter Reformation age. On these topics, she has published numerous articles in The Burlington Magazine and other international journals. She has written a monograph, Girolamo Muziano. Dalla Maniera alla Natura (1532-1592) (2008), coedited La cappella Contarelli in S. Luigi dei Francesi. Arte e committenza nella Roma di Caravaggio (2005), and edited the proceedings of the international conference Arte e committenza nel Lazio nell'età di Cesare Baronio (2009).
She was the coordinator of a two-year funded project (PRIN 2009) on "Venetian Cardinals: Art and Patronage between Rome and Venice (1523-1605)," and the coeditor (with Caterina Furlan) of the forthcoming volume based on this project (Cardinali della Serenissima: arte e committenza tra Roma e Venezia nel Cinquecento, Silvana editoriale, 2014).

University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

Living icons: saints and representation in Byzantium and Italy in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries

2012-2013

Paroma Chatterjee earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago (Dec. 2007). Her areas of research cover the visual arts of the medieval Mediterranean, particularly Byzantium and its connections with the Italian peninsula. The primary archive for her research is the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, Egypt, which holds one of the most magnificent collections of Byzantine icons in the world. Paroma has published articles on subjects such as Byzantine image theory, St. Francis' stigmata, ekphrasis, and the Monastery of St. Catherine, among others. Her book project investigates the emergence of a novel iconic format -- the so-called "vita" icon, displaying the portrait of a saint flanked by scenes from his/her life -- in the eastern and the western Mediterranean in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Paroma's work has been supported by a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship, a Kress Travel Fellowship, and Mellon pre- and post-doctoral fellowships. After her year at the Italian Academy, she will take up a position at the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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.

Università Roma Tre (Italy)

The autonomy of mind and reason: a neglected philosophical legacy in cognitive neuroscience

2024–2025: Fall

Paolo Pecere is associate professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar at New York University (2016–17). His research ranges from early modern to contemporary philosophy, natural science and psychology, with a main focus on Kant and the Kantian legacy. His books include: La filosofia della natura in Kant (2009), Meccanica quantistica rappresentazione realtà (2012, con A. Bassi e N. Argentieri), Dalla parte di Alice. La coscienza e l’immaginario (2015), Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science. A Critical History (2020), and La natura della mente (2023). He is also a writer of fiction and non-fiction: he published two novels (La vita lontana, 2018; Risorgere, 2019), and the narrative essay Il dio che danza. Viaggi, trance, trasformazioni (2021). The new narrative essay Il senso della natura. Sette sentieri per la Terra (Sellerio, 2024) deals with ecology and our relationship with landscape and other living beings in the contemporary world. A translation will be published in Spain by Anagrama, and more translations are being planned.

Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy)

The vernacular and the rhetoric of science at the Accademia degli Infiammati in Padua

2024–2025: Spring

Paolo Celi is the Principal Investigator in a University of Padua research project on sixteenth-century correspondence sonnets, based on the case study of the Florentine poet, philosopher, and historian Benedetto Varchi. He graduated in Modern Philology with Giuliano Tanturli at the University of Florence and obtained his PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Pisa with a project on Bronzino's lyric poetry, for which he is preparing a complete critical and annotated edition. He was recently an Ahmanson Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2022–2023), and an H.P. Kraus Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Università di Trento

The legal training of Francesco Guicciardini and his political lexicon

2010-2011: Spring

Paolo Carta is professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Trento. He also taught at the École Normale SupÉrieure (LSH-Lyon). He collaborates with Il Pensiero Politico (as editor of the section Cinquecento) and with the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance. He is co-director of the journal Laboratoire italien, published by the ENS editions (École Normale SupÉrieure). His principal object of study is the history of political thought in Renaissance Europe, with a particular focus on the relationship between law and politics. Among his main publications are: Nunziature ed eresia nel Cinquecento (1999) and Ricordi politici (2003), dedicated to the history of the apostolic nunciatures in the age of Reformation; La RÉpublique en exile XVe-XVIe siècles (2002), edited with Lucie De Los Santos and Scritti sul Principe di Niccolò Machiavelli by Ugo Foscolo and Angelo Ridolfi (2004) edited with Christian del Vento and Xavier Tabet. His latest book is Francesco Guicciardini tra diritto e politica (2008). Recently he also edited Machiavel aux XIXe et XXe siècles (2007), Ordine giuridico e ordine politico (2008) and GÉographie et politique au dÉbut de l'âge moderne (2008). He is also the author of Il poeta e la polis (2003), an essay dedicated to the dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Wystan H. Auden on forgiveness. At the Italian Academy he will work on the formative years of Francesco Guicciardini and the development of his political thought. His research is also an investigation of the historical and doctrinal roots of Guicciardini's maxim: you cannot hold states according to conscience, for if you consider their origin, they are all illegitimate.

Università di Trento

The emotional body: the expression of emotions in Descartes, Cureau de la Chambre, and Le Brun

2015-2016: Fall

Paola Giacomoni is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Trento. She holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Bologna and collaborates with several Italian and international universities,including the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she was a research fellow in 2011. Her main scientific interests concern the relationship between philosophy, science, and art, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 2003 and 2004 she was the scientific curator of a large exhibition which spanned art and science, about the history of landscape. More recently she has been working on the expression of emotions, starting from Descartes up to the contemporary debate. She has published numerous essays internationally, several edited books, and five monographs, including "Le forme e il vivente. Morfologia e filosofia della natura in J. W. Goethe," Naples, 1993, "Il laboratorio della natura," Milan, 2001, and "Ardore. Quattro prospettive sull’ira da Achille agli Indignados," Rome, 2014.

Web page: http://www5.unitn.it/People/it/Web/Persona/PER0004248#INFO

Università di Milano – Bicocca

Pious bodies and Sensuous spirits: Sufi experiences and vocabularies in contemporary Egypt

2012-2013: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Paola Abenante graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome and did her master's degree in Anthropology and Ethnography at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris.
She received her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2010 with a thesis on Sufism and religious subjectivity in contemporary Egypt.
Ethnographically her work describes the vocabulary and semantic scenes that inform Sufi praxis today and explores how individual Sufi disciples concretely mobilize beliefs and ritual practices to make sense of their everyday life. This combined analysis sheds light on the hermeneutic openings and inner tensions of the Islamic living religious tradition, thus questioning conventional understandings of Islam as a coherent set of doctrines and rituals that impose on human beings. On a theoretical level, the research specifically deals with the relation between phenomenological modes of analysis -- centering on notions of time, embodiment and the constitution of the religious self -- and the analysis of the discursive dynamics within the religious field in Egypt.
During her post-doc at the Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Bergen, her work centered on how people's religious commitment is constrained and reshaped by the urgency of social, economic and political conditions. In particular, since she started her collaboration as associate researcher at the IREMAM (Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman) in Aix en Provence in 2009, her work has dealt with the interplay between structural conditions of migration, religious networks and individual experience.

Bowdoin College

Italy's Forgotten Refugees

2005-2006

Pamela Ballinger is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College. She holds degrees from Stanford University (B.A. 1990), Cambridge University (M. Phil. 1991), and Johns Hopkins University (M.A. 1994, Ph.D.1998). She is author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (2003, Princeton University Press). She has published on topics that include D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume, Trieste and "imperial nostalgia," the Adriatic "seascape," hybridity, and the repressed memory movement. Her current book project takes the fate of the Italian populations of Istria as a starting point for analyzing the broader topic of the "return" of Italian nationals to peninsular Italy from former Italian possessions after World War II. She is also interested in issues of coastal development in contemporary Croatia, having begun a new ethnographic project that examines meanings of place, the politics of vacation homes, and the reconfiguration of the tourist industry in Istria.

Universidad Complutense - Madrid

A king's treasures: Charles of Bourbon and the display of Herculaneum's antiquities, 1738–1746

2010-2011: Spring

Pablo Vázquez-Gestal is an early modern historian who studies the court traditions and representational strategies of the eighteenth-century European monarchies. He completed his PhD at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2008. Presently he is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, having previously been a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Research Fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples. His monograph entitled El espacio del poder ("The Space of Power") was published in 2005. In 2009 he received the Pablo de Olavide Prize for his book on the political culture of the Spanish crown in the eighteenth century. His current project analyzes different models of self-representation in the court of Charles of Bourbon in Naples.

Fulbright Fellow

Rome Staging Europe: Exploring National and Transnational Identity on European Festival Stages

2002-2003

Dr. P. A. Skantze is an independent scholar and director living and working in Italy. She was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Rome 2001-2002. Her book "Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre" is coming out this year in Routledge's new Studies in Renaissance Literature series. Her current project is "Staging Europe" an exploration of "European identity" after unification on festival stages. Future projects include a possible production of Aphra Behn's "The Feigned Courtesans" to be staged at the Villa Medici.

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

Ruhr Universität Bochum

Urbi et orbi 2.0? The Vatican as a transnational actor in a changing international system

2013-2014: Spring

Otto Kallscheuer has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Dynamics in the History of Religion" at the University of Bochum (Germany); he has also held visiting professorships at various universities in Germany (Berlin, Giessen, Bonn), Switzerland (Lucerne, Basel) and Italy (Naples, Rome, Sassari). Publications include: "Giustizia e libertà in Marx" (1984); "Das Europa der Religionen" (1996); "Die Wissenschaft vom Lieben Gott" [The Science of the Good God] (2006, 2008); "Zur Zukunft des Abendlandes" [The Future of the Old West] (2009). He is a regular contributor to major German newspapers. His research at the Italian Academy will focus on the challenges of the globalized world-system for the policies and structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

Warburg Institute

London

Seduction and Science: A History of Humors and Animal Spirits

2002-2003

Noga Arikha, raised in Paris and based in London, received from the Warburg Institute both her MA in Renaissance Studies (1996) and her PhD (2001), which traced a history of the mind-body problem in the seventeenth century. Her current research likewise draws together history of ideas and mind sciences. She is writing a book which explores the history of humoral theories and analyses the status of scientific explanations of the human mind. She has worked for the New York Review of Books (1993) and for its Italian edition, La Rivista dei Libri (1994-97). With the Paris-based Euro-edu Foundation, she is a co-organizer of multilingual Web symposia: text-e (2001-2), about the impact of the Internet on texts; art & cognition (Fall 2002), of direct relevance to the Academy's Art and Neuroscience Project.

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Adolescence inside and out

2023-24: Fall

Università di Feltre

Italy

Lacuna: Building the Void for a New Theory of Literary Expression

2005-2006

Nicola Gardini received a Laurea in Lettere Classiche from the Università degli Studi di Milano and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. He currently teaches Comparative Literature at the Università degli Studi di Palermo. He is the author of numerous articles, essays, literary translations from various languages, and poems. His second novel is due to be published next year. More information can be found at Nicola Gardini's website.

Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy) 

Nonlocal models in traffic flow and elasticity

2026–2027: Spring

Nicola De Nitti is a mathematician specializing in applied analysis and partial differential equations, currently a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematical analysis at the Polytechnic University of Bari. He earned his PhD summa cum laude from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2023 under the supervision of Enrique Zuazua and then held a postdoctoral position at EPFL in Maria Colombo’s group and a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Pisa. He is a member of the European Mathematical Society Young Academy for the 2026–2029 term. At the Italian Academy, he will work on nonlocal models arising in the applied sciences.  

Website: www.nicodenitti.com

German Historical Institute Washington (USA)
Università di Padova (Italy)

Italian colonialism in one family: two biographies

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Nicola Camilleri is a modern historian focusing on the social and cultural history of Europe from a global and postcolonial perspective. He received his PhD in Modern History from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2017 and worked as postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War based at the University of Padua (2019–2022). He has been a fellow at several research institutions, including the German Historical Institutes in Washington DC, Paris and Warsaw, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt and the Remarque Institute, NYU, in New York City. During his PhD, he carried out research in Eritrea and Tanzania as well as in Italy and Germany; moreover, he enjoyed positions as visiting scholar at the Hiob Ludolf Center for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies of the University of Hamburg and as fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz.

Nicola’s first book deals with norms and practices of citizenship in the German and Italian colonial empires by closely looking at the colonies of Eritrea and German East Africa. The second book is an investigation of male sociability and civilian weapon culture in Imperial Germany and its colonies. His work has appeared among other venues in the Journal of Modern European History and Northeast African Studies. The article‚ “Citizens, Subjects, Enemies. Citizenship and First World War in the Italian Colonies” is forthcoming in European History Quarterly.

During his stay at the Italian Academy, Nicola will piece together the story of a family of former colonial subjects that allows new important insights in the history of Italian colonialism on the whole. The major aim of the project is to rethink and decentralize Italian history in a global sense.

University of Cambridge

United Kingdom

Gianfrancesco Sagredo: The Virtual Virtuoso

2005-2006

Nick Wilding was awarded his PhD in History from the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (2000). He has taught at Stanford University and the department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, where he was a British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow (2002-2005). He has published articles on Robert Hooke, Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins. His interests include the history of science in the early modern period and the history of the book. He is currently working on a new translation of Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems for Penguin and writing a biography of Galileo's close friend, the Venetian natural philosopher Gianfrancesco Sagredo.

Independent Scholar (Japan)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Sylvo-urbanism: reframing nature and urban trees in Early Modern Rome

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Natsumi Nonaka is a historian of architecture and the built environment focusing on early modern Europe. She holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA in Letters (French Literature) and a BA in Liberal Arts (French Studies) from the University of Tokyo. She has held research fellowships at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, United States.

Natsumi’s research concerns the relationship between humans and nature in the city, the cognitive experience of architecture and landscapes, transcultural encounters and the transmission and cross-fertilization of artistic forms and ideas, and the study of nature and the classification of knowledge.

Among her publications are Renaissance Porticoes and Painted Pergolas (2017), the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in early modern Italy; “Verdant Architecture and Tripartite Chorography” (2019), on the spatial understanding in the classical tradition in which landscapes are perceived in three divisions; “The Aviaries of the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine” (2016), on the architectural typology of the aviary and the confluence of European and Ottoman artistic traditions; and “Une épistémologie du treillage (Framing Knowledge)” (2024), on the intersection between the aviary, the art and craft of treillage, and cataloguing nature.

Natsumi has also been part of collaborative research projects including The Interactive Nolli Map Project (Stanford University; https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/nolli/) and the PuNaCa (Putting Nature in a Cage) Project (Sorbonne Université, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Université Lumière Lyon; https://etudierlesvolieres.wordpress.com/).

At the Italian Academy, Natsumi will work towards completing the manuscript for her second monograph, tentatively titled The Century of Trees: Nature and the City in Early Modern Europe. The study deals with the greening of early modern cities with special focus on Rome, proposing sylvo-urbanism as a viable approach for the future.

Sapienza University of Rome (Italy) 

Algorithmic problems for the web economy 

2026–2027: 12 months

I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Sapienza University of Rome. My research lies at the intersection of algorithms, machine learning, and economics, with a focus on developing rigorous theoretical frameworks to understand and optimize modern web platforms. In particular, my work focuses on online algorithms, especially stochastic variants of online matching, as well as learning algorithms for discrete choice models, including Random Utility Models and Multinomial Logit/Plackett–Luce models. 

Beyond research, I have contributed to the academic community as a reviewer for leading conferences in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, including ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (2025, 2026), Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science conference (2025), International Conference on Machine Learning (2026), and AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2026).

Website: mirkogiacchini.github.io

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

Uppsala University

Prudenti: Machiavelli and Tocqueville on liberty, empire, and justice

2009-2010: Fall

Senior Lecturer, Uppsala University, Department of History of Science and Ideas. He is author of Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and several major articles on Machiavelli and Renaissance political thought, including "The Two Myths of Civic Humanism," in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2000). In the past, he has held fellowships at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Stanford Humanities Center and The National Humanities Center.

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 Torino (Italy)

Egyptian notions of cultural heritage in ancient times: memory and identity (Enchantment)

2023–2024: Fall

Micòl Di Teodoro holds a PhD in Egyptian Archaeology from University College London. The focus of her doctoral dissertation, published in 2018, was the organization of temporary labor in ancient Egypt through a combination of written sources and archaeological evidence. In past years, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Egyptian Museum of Turin, and at the University of Turin, Italy.

Her research involved the study of papyrus fragments in hieratic script concerning the semi-literary genre of calendars of lucky and unlucky days, and the transmission of this genre over time. A monograph about it is forthcoming. Her research interests span from labor in ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East to divinatory practices, memory and identity formation, ancient knowledge transfer, historical consciousness, and cultural transmission.

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

 Università degli Studi di Palermo (Italy)

The anxious storyteller: narrative as unburdening

2024–2025: Fall

Michele Cometa is a Professor of Cultural Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. His research interests include Aesthetics (especially word-text relations, iconotexts, and optical devices in literature), 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-Century literature and culture (German cultural history, the age of Goethe, Romanticism) and Biopoetics (cognitive bases of narrativity and picture-making, literature, and evolution). He has edited the Italian translation of many classics of aesthetics and literary works.

He has been a fellow of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2015) and of the Italian Academy (2015–2016) and held the “De Sanctis” Chair at the ETH Zurich (2022).

In 2019 he was awarded the city of Stendal’s Winckelmann Medal. In 2017 he was awarded the Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize for the book Why Stories Help us to Live (Raffaello Cortina, 2016), which is the outcome of research undertaken at the Italian Academy in 2015–2016. During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will focus on the philosophical and cognitive meaning of anxiety for a theory of narrative.

Website: www.michelecometa.it

Università di Palermo

The challenge of cave art: old and new paradigms in aesthetics and visual culture

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Michele Cometa is Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. He was a visiting professor at many European universities and recently received the Beinecke Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown).
His research focuses on German cultural history and aesthetics (especially in the age of Goethe), literary theory, and visual culture. Recent publications include works on ékphrasis, literature, and visual culture: Descrizione e desiderio. I quadri viventi di E. T. A. Hoffmann (2005); Vedere: Lo Sguardo di E. T. A. Hoffmann (2009); La scrittura delle immagini. Letteratura e cultura visuale (2012); and Archeologie del dispositivo. Regimi scopici della letteratura (2016).
His book on the Triumph of Death fresco in Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo and his first work on the biological meaning of fiction (La letteratura necessaria. Narrazione e biologia)are in press.
At the Italian Academy he will work on the challenge that paleolithic “arts” and the old and new theories on the origin of human symbolic behaviour issue to contemporary visual culture.

Web page: http://www.michelecometa.it/

Università di Pisa

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture And Religion

Social anti-Semitism in the Counter-Enlightenment 

2008-2009: Fall

Michele Battini is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Pisa. He has been a post graduate student and a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, then Charge and Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pisa. He has been a research fellow or delivered lectures at, among other institutions, the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis of Amsterdam, the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris, the Université de Marseille - Aix en Provence, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of: L'Ordine della Gerarchia. I contributi reazionari e progressisti alle crisi della democrazia in Francia 1789-1914 (Turin, 1995); Guerra ai civili. Occupazione Tedesca e Politica del Massacro - Toscana 1944 (Venice, 1997); and “Rhetorics of Hierarchy: On Linguistic and Ideological Premises of Totalitarian Fascism” in S. Avineri and Z. Sternhell’s Europe’s Century of Discontent (Jerusalem, 2003). His most recent book is The Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics (New York, 2007).

Università di Palermo

Post-war reconstruction and regional development. World Bank development policy in Italy, 1947–1967

2009-2010: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Global Development and Finance

Michele Alacevich is a research fellow at the University of Palermo, Italy. His research interests include the political economy of international organizations in historical perspective, the contemporary history of economic development and financial institutions, the role of economic advisors in international relations, and the history of development economics in the twentieth century.
Michele obtained his Ph.D. in Economic and Business History at the University of Milano in 2006. His Ph.D. thesis was published as The Political Economy of the World Bank:The Early Years, by Stanford University Press, 2009 (originally published in Italian in 2007 by Bruno Mondadori and forthcoming in French, Russian and Spanish). He has also co-authored, with Daniela Parisi, Economia politica. Un'introduzione storica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009, and is the author of several articles published in scholarly journals on the history of economic institutions and ideas after World War II. Michele has been a consultant to the World Bank for historical research.
At the Italian Academy, Michele will work on his next book on the policies for regional development after World War II and the World Bank loans to Italy, from 1948 to1965. This book is the final outcome of his research program at the University of Palermo on regional economic backwardness in historical perspective and the Italian Mezzogiorno, and will appear in the series of historical studies of Banca d'Italia, published by Laterza.

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. 

Columbia University

Early modern diplomatic networks in the transmission of culture

2008-2009

Megan K. Williams is a scholar of early modern European history, with emphases on sixteenth-century socio-economic, diplomatic and international legal history. Her work has focused on the lands and neighbors of Habsburg Central Europe, including Venice, Hungary, and the eastern Adriatic. 

She recently defended her doctoral dissertation in history at Columbia University. Entitled "Dangerous Diplomacy and Dependable Kin: Transformations in Central European Statecraft, 1526-1540", her dissertation examined early modern conceptions of diplomatic mobility and immunity as well as the manner in which diplomacy conducted as a family enterprise helped early modern diplomats overcome challenges to their mobility and credibility. Although historians of Renaissance diplomacy have focused chiefly on the development of the resident embassy, her research used diplomatic correspondence and other archivally-preserved materials to argue for the importance of transit and mobility in early modern political communications, and particularly in the construction of secular norms of diplomatic immunity, nascent discourses of territorial sovereignty, and prevailing notions of European political community during the Italian Wars of the early sixteenth century and at the height of Habsburg and Ottoman imperial expansion. 

Research for her dissertation was conducted at archives and libraries in Italy, the Vatican, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Belgium, and was supported by numerous grants and awards, including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (Italy, Austria, Hungary), the German Marshall Research Fellowship (Austria, Hungary), and the Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities. 

Her fellowship at the Italian Academy focuses on the role of diplomatic networks -- and the mobility they facilitated -- in the transmission of culture, exploring a series of Italian or Italian-educated families engaged in early sixteenth-century anti-Habsburg or anti-Imperial diplomacy, such as the Casali family of Bologna and Rome, who are best-known for soliciting the annulment of English king Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, but who also acted as representatives of Hungarian king János I. Szapolyai for over a decade; or the Rorarii of Friulian Pordenone, whose most famous member and papal nuncio to Hungary, Girolamo, authored a 1548 treatise which was later incorporated into Cartesian debates on animal rationality. During her time at the Italian Academy, Megan will complete several articles which emerged out of her dissertation research and will work on revising her manuscript for publication. 

Megan Williams has also been an active participant at Columbia University's interdisciplinary Institute for Social & Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), and has presented her research at a wide range of academic venues in the United States and in Europe. Her teaching experience includes courses on early modern Europe, 1450-1789, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern and Central Europe.

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

Università di Genova

Alexander Pekelis: life, work and ideas

2008-2009: Fall

Mauro Grondona was born in Genoa, Italy, on September 15, 1972. He was trained in law at the University of Genoa and graduated in 1996. After a four year post-graduate scholarship from the University of Genoa, he received a PhD in Private Law from the University of Pisa (2005). He currently teaches Private Law at the University of Genoa (Faculty of Law).
He is author of two books (La clausola risolutiva espressa, 1998; L’ordine giuridico dei privati, 2008, forthcoming) and several papers on topics such as contract law, tort law, family law, interpretation of the law, and comparative law.
His main interests in his research work are the role and the power of the judge, and the history of legal ideas and their impact on society.
In his semester at the Italian Academy, he will work on the exemplary figure of Alexander Pekelis, a jurist and a legal philosopher who escaped from Russia in 1917, living first in Italy (where he taught Legal Theory at the University of Rome "La Sapienza") and then, due to the Fascist Racial Laws, in the USA, becoming, along the path of Legal Realism, a pioneer in the social research against the excesses of Legal Formalism.

Universita' di Milano

Mnemosyne and Mythical Time Nowadays

2004-2005

After studies at the Universities of Bologna and Padua (Italy), Mauro Carbone received his PhD in 1990 at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, with a dissertation awarded by the Royal Academy of Belgium. A revised and enlarged edition of this work is available in French under the title La visibilité de l'invisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Cézanne et Proust [The Visibility of the Invisible: Merleau-Ponty between Cézanne and Proust] (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001). An English collection of his essays, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy, was published in the Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series of Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL: 2004). Mauro Carbone is also the founder and a member of the Board of Directors of the journal Chiasmi International. Trilingual Studies concerning Merleau-Ponty's Thought (http://filosofia.dipafilo.unimi.it/~chiasmi/). At the Italian Academy Carbone's work will aim at verifying the relevance of Proust's concept of reminiscence in our epoch, as well as at verifying whether the most recent developments of arts could still be interpreted according to that direction, or rather open different ways of philosophically thinking reminiscence, recognition and memory themselves.

University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Staging Baroque opera today

2025–2026: Spring

Mauro Calcagno teaches Historical Musicology and Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directed the Center for Italian Studies. He received his PhD from Yale University and has taught at Harvard and Stony Brook University. His work focuses on opera studies, early modern music and poetry, performance studies, and digital humanities. His publications include the book From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self (University of California Press) and essays published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of Musicology, among others. He is the co-director of the Marenzio Online Digital Edition (MODE) and edited the volume Perspectives on Luca Marenzio's Secular Music. His edition of Francesco Cavalli's opera Eliogabalo is forthcoming from Bärenreiter. His current project focuses on Italian Baroque opera productions in Europe and the U.S. over the past fifty years, revising traditional narratives in opera studies by treating performance as a form of historiography.

More information: https://music.sas.upenn.edu/people/mauro-calcagno

State University of New York at Stony Brook

The contemporary performance of Italian Baroque opera

2011-2012

Mauro Calcagno is Associate Professor of Musicology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His work focuses on early opera (especially those by Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli), the madrigal, and performance studies, with an emphasis on early modern Italy. Calcagno has recently completed a book entitled From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self, to be shortly published by University of California Press. He served as the President of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society, and he currently directs a new online digital edition of Luca Marenzio's secular works (http://www.marenzio.org).

Università per Stranieri di Siena

The educational network in Italy from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries: church, state, and society

2010-2011: Fall

Maurizio Sangalli was born in Lovere (Bergamo, Italy) in 1968 and now lives in Florence. At the University of Pavia he obtained his academic degree in Lettere moderne in 1992 (110/110 cum laude), with a thesis on the miracles in the Milanese Diocese in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, with tutor Prof. Xenio Toscani.
In 1994 he took a PhD in "Politica religione e società nella formazione dell'Europa moderna" at the Università cattolica in Milan (with Prof. Massimo Marcocchi and Prof. Cesare Mozzarelli). The title of the thesis was "Cultura politica e religione nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento."
He also obtained also scholarships from the Centro universitario cattolico, in 1993 and 1994; the Ecole française de Rome, in 1994 and 1995; and the Deutsches Historisches Institut im Rom, in 2001.
He was director of the Diocesan Library "Alessandro VII" in Siena in 1996-2003. During the same period, he was overseer within the Library of the Accademia galileiana di scienze, lettere ed arti in Padua (2000-2001), and president of the counsel and director of the scientific committee of the Centro studi per la storia del clero e dei seminari (2000-2006).
From 2003 he has been associate professor in Early Modern History at the Università per stranieri in Siena, where also teaches Medieval History. He is a University Rector's delegate to the Library of the university and a member of the staff of the university's international committee.
He has organized national and international congresses and is the coordinator of national research programs. He has been invited to hold fellowships at the Universities of Warsaw and Istanbul.
He has studied Italian social and religious history in the XVI-XVIII centuries and the history of education in the ancient Italian states. His main works are Miracoli a Milano. I processi informativi per eventi miracolosi nel Milanese in età spagnola, Ned, Milano 1993; Cultura, politica e religione nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento. Gesuiti e Somaschi a Venezia, Istituto veneto di scienze lettere ed arti, Venezia 1999; Università, Accademie, Gesuiti. Cultura e religione a Padova tra XVI e XVII secolo, Lint, Trieste 2001; Pastori pope preti rabbini. La formazione del ministro di culto in Europa (secoli XVI-XIX), atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Montalcino 26-28 febbraio 2004, Carocci, Roma 2005.

National University of Singapore

When shrines grow tired: caring for cultural artifacts in the premodern world

2018-2019: Spring

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Born in Rome, I am a professor of cultural history at the National University of Singapore. I held visiting appointments at Université Paris Diderot VII, Humboldt University, UC Berkeley and Cornell University. I have published widely on the cultural history of Thailand (with a focus on material culture) and on heritage conservation in Southeast Asia including the books, Monastery, Monument, Museum: Sites and Artifacts of Thai Cultural Memory (2017), Thailand the Worldly Kingdom (2007), Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy's Modern Image (2002), The Politics of Ruins and the Business of Nostalgia (2002). My articles have appeared in the Journal of Social Archaeology, Journal of Social History, and Modern Asian Studies among others. My abiding interest in classical architecture and Roman history underlies my research project at the Italian Academy.

Web page: http://nus.academia.edu/MaurizioPeleggi

Duke University (USA)

Ruinscapes and neuroartifacts

2024–2025: Fall

Maurizio Forte is William and Sue Gross Professor of Classical Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. He is a classical archaeologist and scholar specializing in the innovative use of digital technologies in archaeological research and cultural heritage preservation. He has made significant contributions to the field through interdisciplinary collaboration, cutting-edge technology integration, and pioneering methodologies. Forte’s research interests encompass various aspects of archaeology, including landscape archaeology, virtual reconstructions of ancient sites, and the exploration of the sensory experiences of past civilizations. He is known for his work at several archaeological sites worldwide, where he has applied advanced techniques such as 3D modeling, virtual reality, remote sensing, AI and neuroscience applications to enhance our understanding of ancient cultures. In addition to his scholarly endeavors, Maurizio Forte has published a substantial body of literature, comprising over 300 research papers, and he is the author and editor of 23 books.

Website: https://www.maurizioforte.com/

Università degli Studi di Torino

Documentality: the ontology of social objects

2006-2007

Maurizio Ferraris (Turin, 1956) is professor of philosophy at the University of Turin, where he heads the Center for Theoretical and Applied Ontology and the Laboratory of Ontology.
Awarded many literary and research prizes (fellow of the Italian Academy at the Columbia University, "Claretta" Prize, Valitutti Prize, Castiglioncello Philosophical Prize), he is the author of 30 books and more than 1,000 scientific articles.
A more extensive version of his curriculum, with a complete bibliography, descriptions and reviews of his works can be found at labont.it/ferraris.

The Medici Archive Project

A Society on the March: The Terzo Vecchio of the Italian Infantry (1597-1715) 

2010-2011: Spring

Maurizio Arfaioli (Ph.D. in History, University of Warwick, 2002) is Adjunct Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project, an international Foundation based in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. His research interests focus on the political, social and cultural history of Renaissance and early modern Italy, with an emphasis on military history. In particular, Dr. Arfaioli has studied the rise of the Florentine military system under the reign of Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), and the role played by the Italian troops in Spanish service in early modern European conflicts. He has also been studying military iconography in frescoes, paintings and engravings, as well as the imagery in contemporary epic poetry, as historical sources. At the Italian Academy Dr. Arfaioli will carry out a study of the early modern Italian military in Spanish service, following the history of the 'Terzo Vecchio', the longest-lived unit of Italian infantry that served the Habsburg kings of Spain.

Universita' di Cassino

A Structural Health Monitoring Approach to Detect Damage in Historical Constructions

2004-2005

Maura Imbimbo is Associate Professor of Structural Analysis and Design at the University of Cassino. She received a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II. From 1996 to 2003 she received fellowships and grants from the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research and from the Italian National Research Council (C.N.R.). During 2002 and 2003 she was visiting scholar at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics of Columbia University. She is local responsible of the research project "R.C. structural elements strengthened in shear by FRP: theoretical and experimental modelling and structural health monitoring ", supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research. She was member of the Scientific Committee for doctoral theses and the Tribunal for doctoral theses at the Departamento de Ingeniería de la Construcción, Unversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2002-2003). She is author of more than 40 papers published on international technical journals and conference proceedings. Her main research studies are base isolation (modelling of the non linear behaviour of elastomeric bearings for base isolation, mixed f.e.m. for rubber-like material), composite materials (shear and flexural strengthening of reinforced concrete structural elements with composite sheets, strengthening of masonry arches with composite sheets), masonry structures (stabilization and stability of leaning towers, analyses of the safety conditions of the Colosseum in Rome), system identification (damage identification, reduced order models).

Università di Cassino

Damage Detection of Large Scale Structures under Seismic Ground Motions

2009-2010: Spring

Maura Imbimbo is Associate Professor of Structural Analysis and Design at the University of Cassino. She received a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II. From 1996 to 2003 she received fellowships and grants from the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research and from the Italian National Research Council (C.N.R.). In Fall 2004 she was a Fellow at Columbia's Italian Academy; in 2002 and 2003 she was visiting scholar at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics of Columbia University; and during 2000 she was visiting scholar at the Departamento de Ingeniería de la Construcción, Unversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. She was the local manager for the research project "R.C. structural elements strengthened in shear by FRP: theoretical and experimental modeling and structural health monitoring," supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research. She was a member of the Scientific Committee for doctoral theses and the Tribunal for doctoral theses at the Departamento de Ingeniería de la Construcción, Unversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2002-2003). She is the author of more than 60 papers published in international technical journals and conference proceedings. Her main research areas are base isolation, innovative material (FRP) for the strengthening of structures, modeling and analysis of masonry structures, dynamic identification and health monitoring.

Columbia University; New York University

Brain representations of mental states: the neuronal integration of emotion and cognition

2013-2014: Fall

Ecole Normale Supérieure

Cultural cognition in the "we-mode"

2013-2014: Fall

Mattia Gallotti is a postdoctoral fellow in the philosophy of mind and society. He was educated in economics and philosophy at Bocconi University and the London School of Economics, before receiving his PhD at the University of Exeter. As a trained philosopher, Gallotti's work to date has sought to connect and unify a number of research domains under the general heading of sociality, with a focus on interdisciplinary questions concerning the foundations of the social mind. Throughout the years, his work was supported by generous funding from several institutions like the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the École Normale Supérieure(ENS), which afforded him the opportunity to carry out interdisciplinary research in premiere centres for the study of human sociality across the mind and brain sciences.

According to many philosophers and scientists, sociality is explained by the capacity of individuals to 'share' the mental states of others. In recent published papers in philosophy and cognitive science journals, including Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Behavioural and Brain Sciences and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Gallotti offers a theory of shared intentionality which gives pride of place to one cognitive mechanism in particular, the so-called 'we-mode', for addressing issues of social cognition and agency. At the Italian Academy, he will articulate the we-mode approach to collective intentionality with an eye to its implications for the study of cultural cognition, notably the nature of cultural artifacts in social ontology.

Post-doctoral Research Scholar

Researcher for publications on neuroscience and culture supported by the NOMIS Foundation 

2020-2021

Matthew Peebles holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied both ancient Greek and ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology. His research, focusing on the codification and cross-cultural exchange of key gestural motifs in antiquity, has been complemented by several seasons of archaeological fieldwork at the Sanctuary of Poseidon in Onchestos, Greece. During the 2019–2020 academic year, he served as content manager for Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments, a survey of monuments and architecture in Iraqi Kurdistan, southeastern Anatolia (Turkey), and southern Iraq.

Funding for his research at the Academy is provided by NOMIS, a private Swiss foundation; he is assisting David Freedberg in preparing two books on the topic of neuroscience and culture.

Architectural Association School of Architecture (London, UK)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Sacred spaces in profane buildings

2022-2023: Fall

Matilde Cassani studied Architecture at Politecnico di Milano and UPC, Universidade Politecnica de Catalunya, in Barcelona. She holds a PhD in Spatial planning and Urban Development at Politecnico di Milano. She worked for GTZ, German Technical Cooperation, in Sri Lanka, where she developed research on the post-tsunami reconstruction process. She was a consultant for the World Bank in Malawi, and she’s currently a practicing architect at Matilde Cassani Studio.

Her practice deals with the spatial implications of cultural pluralism in the contemporary Western city. Fundamental themes of her research activity concern cultural difference as a generative model of building design and public space; religious differences in the contemporary city and their spatial implications (temporary places of worship, celebrations, pilgrimage sites); the relationship between public space and superdiversity in the contemporary European city.

Her works have been showcased in many cultural institutions, art galleries and were published in several magazines. She has been a resident fellow at “Akademie Schloss Solitude” in Stuttgart and at the “Headlands Center for the Arts” in San Francisco. The long-term research project “Sacred spaces in profane buildings” has been exhibited, among others, in a solo show at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. She designed the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain at the XIII Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, and she was part of the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale with the piece "A Celebration Day”, acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She was involved in the Chicago Architecture Triennale, Oslo Triennale and Manifesta12 and the XVII Architecture Biennale. She has taught and lectured in many international universities, and she currently teaches at NABA, and at the Architectural Association in London working with Unit 11.

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.

European University Institute - Florence

In others' words: foreigners, languages and interpreters in Venice, Livorno and Marseilles, c. 1700–c. 1800

2010-2011

For his Ph.D. at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute, in Florence, Mathieu Grenet wrote a dissertation dealing with the comparison of three communities of the Greek diaspora - namely those of Venice, Livorno and Marseille - from the 1770s to the 1830s. A former junior lecturer at the University of Lyon 2, France, he has taught European and French modern history for three years (2003-2006) while being an associate researcher in programs on historical demography and urban history. The author of several articles, he has published on the social and political history of the communities of the Greek diaspora, as well as on other issues such as the migratory networks and the Levant trade, and he is co-organizing a panel on "Migrant Communities and Urban Space in the Mediterranean Ports, 17th-19th centuries" for the 10th International Conference on Urban History, to be held in Ghent, Belgium, in September 2010. His research project at the Italian Academy focuses on interpreters and translators in eighteenth-centuries Italian and French port-cities, tackling the issue of cross-cultural brokerage and intermediation.

Università degli Studi di Milano

Ricercatore di Letteratura Italiana 

2002-2003

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy) 

Hidden libraries: theoretical and socio-cultural approaches to book collections in Ancient Rome 

2026–2027: Fall

Marta Perilli earned her BA and MA in Classics from the University of Florence and her PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore. A revised version of her doctoral dissertation is forthcoming as a monograph titled Giovane, Satira 15: Introduzione, Testo, Traduzione e Commento. She has held Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at both the University of Florence and the Scuola Normale Superiore and has also served as a Lecturer at the University of Florence, where she taught courses in Beginner Latin and Classical Dramaturgy. She was also a Visiting Researcher (with Fellowship) at the Fondation Hardt in Vandoeuvres (Geneva, Switzerland).

Her research focuses primarily on Latin literature of the Imperial period. She has presented her work at national and international seminars, workshops, and conferences, and has published several peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, as well as book chapters in edited volumes.

Her current research builds on the work carried out within the DaliB project (https://dalib.it) at the University of Florence and explores what literary texts can reveal about private libraries in ancient Rome. While Roman authors provide valuable insights into reading, writing, and the circulation of texts, key aspects remain unclear—such as where books were kept within domestic spaces, who had access to them, the contents of private collections, and the role of the personnel responsible for managing them and supporting literary production.
The project seeks to develop a new methodological framework for reconstructing private libraries in antiquity from a diverse and often fragmentary body of evidence, while also examining the socio-cultural conditions that shaped the circulation, management, and preservation of private book collections. 

Focusing on Flavian and Trajanic Rome and on authors such as Martial, Statius, and Pliny the Younger, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of Latin literature, cultural history, and material culture. This evidence-based methodology aims to offer new insights into access to knowledge in antiquity and to provide fresh perspectives on book culture in ancient Rome. 

Villa I Tatti – Harvard University

Artists libraries and the migration of ideas in late Renaissance Italy and Spain

2012-2013: Spring

Marta Cacho Casal received her doctorate from the Warburg Institute (University of London), where she also took an M.A. in Renaissance studies. Her book, Francisco Pacheco y su Libro de retratos (Madrid, 2011) earned her the first Alfonso Pérez Sánchez prize: Velázquez and his century from the Foundation Focus Abengoa, Spain.
Dr. Cacho Casal worked for several years at the Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum, London. Last year she was a fellow at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence. Her publications have focused on Spanish and Italian art, prints and drawings and iconography. Most recently, she has been researching artists' libraries, the use and value artists ascribed to books, and the education of the artist during the end of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Her aim is to write a general history of reading and 'book culture' among artists, particularly painters, in the late Renaissance period, taking as a comparative study the cases of Italy and Spain. From September 2012 she will be Senior Fellow at the Drawings Institute of The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.

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

University of Pittsburgh

Mental time travel

2016-2017: Fall

Markus Kneer is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a PhD in philosophy, an MA in cognitive sciences (both from the Institut Jean Nicod, ENS/EHESS Paris) and a BA in philosophy, politics and economics (University of Oxford). His research focuses on various topics in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and the cognitive sciences broadly conceived.

Columbia University

Aberrant brain development of attention and language circuits as early risk markers of autism

2014-2015: Spring

Marisa Spann obtained a PhD in clinical psychology with a specialization in neuropsychology from George Washington University and a MPH at Yale School of Public Health. She recently completed a T32 postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia University, College of Physicians & Surgeons/New York State Psychiatric Institute with emphasis on translational child psychiatry and developmental neuroimaging. She continues at Columbia as an Associate Research Scientist. Her research centers on how prenatal risk factors affect brain and cognitive development during early childhood, and result in later childhood psychopathology. She is also interested in identifying sensitive timeframes during brain and cognitive development that confer the greatest risk for childhood psychopathology.

University of Liverpool

Identity and migration in eighth- and ninth-century Rome

2013-2014: Spring

Marios Costambeys is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool, UK. He studied for his PhD at the University of Cambridge, and held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. He has been a scholar at the British School at Rome and the Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo in Spoleto, and has recently held a fellowship with the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is the author of Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 2007), and the co-author of The Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2011). At the Academy, he will be concluding his project on migration and identity in eighth- and ninth-century Rome, looking at the impact on the life and image of the city of those who journeyed to and through there, from English pilgrims to Greek monks. This will in turn form one chapter of his general study of Rome in the Carolingian age.

University College London (UK)

Generative AI and the making of images: style transfer, creativity, and the automation of visual imitation

2025–26: Fall and Spring 

Mario Carpo, Guggenheim Fellow in 2022–23, was the Head of the Study Centre at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal from 2002 to 2006 and the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Yale School of Architecture from 2010 to 2014; he has held other roles including Senior Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2000–2001) and Resident at the American Academy in Rome (2004).

Mr. Carpo's research and publications focus on the history of early modern architecture and on the theory and criticism of contemporary design and technology. His award-winning Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001) has been translated into several languages. His most recent books are The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011); The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (2017); and Beyond Digital. Design and Automation at the End of Modernity (2023), all published by the MIT Press. 

More information: mariocarpo.com

University of St. Andrew's

Scotland; Birkbeck College

University of London

Magic and Metamorphosis

2003-2004: Fall

Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic. She has written award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales, including Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (l976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998). In l994 she gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC, on the theme of Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. In l996, she curated The Inner Eye: Art Beyond The Visible, a touring exhibition, and in 2002, the exhibition Metamorphing, for Wellcome Trust at the Science Museum, London. In the autumn of 2001, she was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where she gave the Clarendon Lectures (Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds, Oxford University Press, 2002). Her most recent novel, The Leto Bundle, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In l999, she gave the Tanner Lectures at Yale on the subject of Spirit Visions, and she is developing themes raised there with her current research. She is a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and St. Andrew's University, Scotland, and was recently a Guest Professor at Paris 13. Her collected essays will be coming out in the summer of 2003, under the title Signs & Wonders.

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.

Web page: https://boa.unimib.it/simple-search?query=calloni

Università degli Studi di Pavia

"The other side of philology": stories of literary creation

2007-2008

Mariarosa Bricchi received a Ph.D. from the University of Pavia with a dissertation on Archaic and Literary Vocabulary in the 19th Century Italian Narrative Prose, which was then revised and published as a book under the title "La roca trombazza. Lessico arcaico e letterario nella prosa narrativa dell'Ottocento italiano" (Alessandria, Edizioni dell'Orso, 2000). 

Besides the literary language of the Ottocento (she is currently working on the syntax of Alessandro Manzoni's essays), her areas of interest are: 20th Century Italian and English speaking literature; history of publishing; the process of literary creation, both from the philologists' point of view (the making of a work through manuscript evidence) and the authors' point of view. On these subjects she has published articles, essays and two books, one on Beppe Fenoglio, one on Giorgio Manganelli. 

She is currently professore a contratto of History of the Italian Language at the University of Pavia.

Université de Fribourg

Ambiguity in Italian Renaissance images of love

2011-2012: Fall

Marianne Koos is Privatdozentin (PD) of Art History at the Université de Fribourg. After completing her MA at the Univ. of Vienna and her Ph.D. at the Goethe-Univ. in Frankfurt/Main (2001), she was Assistant Professor in Art History at the Universities of Basel and Zürich and, since 2006, at the University of Fribourg (working with Prof. V. I. Stoichita; Habilitation and appointment as PD in 2010). Her work focuses on Italian art of the 16th and 17th century, with special emphasis on Venetian and Roman painting, as well as on French painting of the 18th century in a broader European and transcultural perspective. She has published, lectured, and taught on the iconography of love, problems of portraiture, questions of gender and postcolonial studies, skin and surface, tactility in the visual arts, or the material agency of artifacts in an anthropological perspective. She is the author of Bildnisse des Begehrens. Das lyrische Männerporträt in der venezianischen Malerei des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts – Giorgione, Tizian und ihr Umkreis (2006) and Haut, Farbe und Medialität. Oberfläche im Werk von Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789) (Habil. 2009, forthcoming). In 2003 she was awarded the Prix ART-FOCUS (senior) of the Association of Swiss Art Historians (ASHHA/VKKS), and in 2008 the Prix Jubilé of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW). She has had numerous fellowships including those from the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut) in Florence, the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani in Venice, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. In 2012/13 she will be a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin.

Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Builders of modern Rome: secondary craftsmen and the development of Roman architectural language in the 16th century

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Marianna Mancini holds an MA in Art History from the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, where her thesis—comparing the art historical theories and methodologies of Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky with a special focus on their application to the study of architecture—was awarded the "Luigi Tagliavini" prize for the best MA thesis in Visual Arts.

In February 2025, she earned her PhD in History of Architecture from the Department of History, Representation and Restoration of Architecture at Sapienza University of Rome. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the palace of the Torres family in Rome, exploring the dynamics between patrons, architects and masons in sixteenth-century Rome and highlighting the circulation of architectural models, knowledge, and techniques beyond the sole agency of the architect. She is currently collaborating with the research group CHROME - Churches of Rome: Atlas of the Chapels of the Capitoline Nobility (1347-1600) (Italian PRIN 2022).

Her broader research interests include the study of architectural drawings produced and preserved in architects' workshops, considering them as instruments for the transmission and transformation of architectural knowledge. In this field, she is carrying out a study of the group of drawings held in the archives of the Hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili in Rome, a particularly interesting example of a graphic collection that provides an insight into the practices of small workshops active in Rome during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Université Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne

Prehistorical modernity: art and time, from the invention of prehistory to the present

2018-2019: Fall

Maria Stavrinaki is an habilitated Associate Professor in history of contemporary art at the Université Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is working at the crossroads of the art of modernity, human sciences and political thought. She is currently writing a book on the Modern uses of Prehistory (19th-21th c.), a topic on which she is also co-curating an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (May-September 2019). She has been a Fellow at the CCA (Montréal), IAS (Princeton), and the Clark Art Institute. Her recent publications include Dada Presentism : An Essay on Art and History (Stanford University Press, 2016), Le sujet et son milieu : huit essais sur les avant-gardes allemandes (Editions du Musée contemporain de Genève, 2018) and Contraindre à la liberté : Carl Einstein, les avant-gardes, l’histoire (Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Les Presses du réel, 2018). 

Web page: https://centregeorgsimmel.ehess.fr/en/membres/membres-statutaires/maria-...

Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca (Italy)

Socrates’ ugliness

2022-2023: Fall

Maria Luisa Catoni is Full Professor of Ancient Art History and Archaeology at IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca (Italy), founder and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage and the Research Unit Lynx: Center for the Interdisciplinary Analysis of Images, Contexts, Cultural Heritage at the same University. She has held positions as Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin; Senior Research Associate at the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; Fellow at the Deutsches Archäeologisches Institut in Rome; fixed-term researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore where she received her education and Ph.D. in Classics and Art History and where she was selected for- and offered a position of Full Professor in Ancient Art History and Archaeology.


She has published extensively in the field of Ancient Art History and Archaeology, with a special interest in non-verbal communication in Classical Antiquity, the functioning of image ecosystems, the relationships between images, medium and social practices, the technical and social processes and contexts of art production, the relationship between written and visual sources as well as the use of art narratives within political discourse in Antiquity. She has also actively researched in the field of Classical Tradition with a special attention to the contexts of XXth century art. She has participated or initiated collaborative projects at the international and national levels in the fields of Ancient Art History and Archaeology, the Classical Tradition, the role of Cultural Heritage and Classics in educational models in Italy and Europe. She has prompted a number of research collaborations with specialists in the fields of innovative methodologies for automatic data analysis, neuroscience as well as with specialists in management and economics in order to analyze the process of profound change that the professions of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage are undergoing.

Catoni has also served at the institutional level in terms of research and training in her fields of expertise.
She has long served as Panel Chair in the most interdisciplinary ERC Panel (SH5), on a number of international advisory Boards (France, Germany, Italy) as well as in national and international research evaluation and funding Committees; she sits on the Scientific/Editorial Boards of a number of scientific journals; she has served as advisor of the Italian Minister of Culture and has founded the new National School of Cultural Heritage in the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Università di Roma Tre

A synthesis of the arts: the artistic experiments of Le Corbusier and Costantino Nivola in New York and Amagansett 1946–1955

2014-2015: Fall

Marida Talamona is a professor in History of Architecture in the Department of Architecture at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre and Director of the European Master’s Degree in History of Architecture. Her studies focus primarily on twentieth century architecture in Italy and France. She is the author of Casa Malaparte (Milan: Clup 1990), recipient of the International Architecture Book Award assigned by The American Institute of Architects (1993) and the Prix du Livre d'Architecture (1996) from the Académie d'Architecture in Paris. She has published essays in Italian and international magazines and collective volumes on the work of L. Figini and G. Pollini, G. Pagano Pogatschnig, A. Libera and L. Moretti, and on the role of Adriano Olivetti in the reconstruction of Southern Italy. She has obtained a PhD in History and Conservation of Art and Architecture with a thesis examining the relationships between Le Corbusier and Italian artistic culture between the two World Wars. She has been curator of the exhibitions L’Italia di Le Corbusier at MAXXI- Rome (October 2012-February 2013) with the accompanying catalogue (Milan: Electa 2012) and Building an Idea: McKim, Mead & White and the American Academy in Rome, 1914-2014 at American Academy in Rome ( May-June 2014), also with the accompanying catalogue (Pistoia: Gli Ori 2014).

Member of the Conseil d’Administration de la Fondation Le Corbusier

Web page: http://www.architettura.uniroma3.it/fac_docenti_scheda.html?id_doc=ARCH0...

Università di Napoli Federico II

The role of formins in synaptotoxic damage and cognitive decline induced by amyloid beta

2016-2017: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Maria Elena Pero is an Assistant Professor in Veterinary Physiology and Lecturer in Veterinary Neurophysiology at the Università di Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy. She holds an M.D. in Veterinary Medicine and a PhD in Comparative Morphology and Physiology. She was a visiting scientist at the Taub Institute of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the Aging Brain at Columbia University where she conducted research to elucidate the mechanisms by which physiological levels of amyloid beta peptide (Aβ1-42), the peptide that abnormally accumulates in the brains of AD patients, positively modulates synaptic plasticity. During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will focus on the pathological role played by neurotoxic levels of Aβ1-42 on synaptic plasticity through formin-mediated regulation of the neuronal cytoskeleton using cellular and animal models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Universita' di Catanzaro

Cellular and Molecular Mechanism Underlying the Persistance of Long-Term Memory

2004-2005

Maria Concetta Miniaci is Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University "Magna Græcia" of Catanzaro and currently a visiting scientist in the laboratory of Eric Kandel at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University. She received her M.D. (cum laude) from the University of Reggio Calabria, Catanzaro. Her main research interests lie in the areas of synaptic plasticity and the mechanisms underlying learning and memory storage. She began her studies by investigating the role of the hippocampus in associative learning in collaboration with Pietro Scotto, University of Catanzaro, and Bruno De Luca, University of Naples. As a Fondazione Bonino Pulejo fellow with Jan Bures at the Academy of Science in Prague, she focused her research on place navigation and the cognitive map of rats guided by vestibular and kinesthetic orienting cues. She next turned her attention to an electrophysiological analysis of synaptic plasticity in the cerebellum as a CNR postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Piergiorgio Strata in Turin. As a fellow of the Italian Academy she will focus on the cellular and molecular events that underlie both the initiation and stabilization of the synaptic changes associated with long-term memory.

University of Massachusetts Boston

The social affordance model: a sensorimotor view of intentional action and aesthetic involvement

2011-2012

Maria Brincker received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York earlier this year. She spent the past semester as a visiting scholar at NYU and will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UMass Boston from 2012. She studied Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, in her native Denmark, and also in Paris, primarily at Nanterre and the Sorbonne. This educational path --repeatedly intersecting with both the Continental and the Anglo-American tradition in philosophy and also with both the humanities and the natural sciences-- has left a defining mark on her heavily interdisciplinary approach.

In her dissertation, directed by Jesse Prinz, she criticizes the traditional theoretical frameworks surrounding the neurological discovery and popularization of so-called mirror neurons. Brincker proposes an alternative "social affordance model" for understanding these and other sensorimotor circuits and their functional role in various cognitive processes. She explicitly uses the analyses of mirror neuron research to advocate for a broader paradigm shift towards more relational and embodied frameworks for understanding the mind.

This doctoral research will also provide the foundation for Brincker's exploration of what one might call "aesthetic affordances," and the role of motor processes and social relations in the appreciation of art, which she will undertake while at the Italian Academy. For more information see her personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/mariabrincker

Università di Parma (Italy)

The embodied consequences of observed impossible movements: a multidisciplinary approach.

2022-2023: Fall and Spring

Prof. Maria Alessandra Umiltà, PhD, is a leading expert in social cognition and electrophysiology techniques on monkeys and humans. Her research interests include the mechanisms of inhibition of voluntary movement, the neural basis of emotion recognition in children and adults, the neural basis of social cognition, the role of the cortical sensory-motor system in the control of higher cognitive functions, and the role of the body in aesthetic experience.

She is Associate Professor of Physiology at the Department of Food and Drug, University of Parma. She is affiliated with the Unit of Neuroscience of the Department of Medicine & Surgery, University of Parma, where she leads the high-density EEG Lab. Since 2007, she has been a member of the board of the International PhD Program in Neuroscience, and she teaches Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Parma.

She has been Honorary Research Associate Fellow with the Sobell Department of Neurophysiology, Institute of Neurology, University College London with Wellcome Trust. She also was an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Department of Art History and Archeology of Columbia University from 2010 to 2022

For the Academic Year 2023-24, she will be affiliated with the Italian Academy as an Adjunct Research Scholar.

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Harvard University

Criminal justice reforms in Republican China 

2018-2019: Spring

Maria Adele Carrai is a senior researcher at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies - KU Leuven and a fellow at the Asia Center of Harvard University. Her research focuses on China’s legal history and how it affects the country’s foreign policy. Her book project A Genealogy of the Concept of Sovereignty in China from 1840 is now under contract with Cambridge University Press. Departing from a legal orientalist approach, it looks at the way Chinese intellectuals, political figures, and diplomats appropriated and articulated the notion of sovereignty in their foreign policy within the new discourse of international law in the period between 1840 to the present. Before she arrived at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute of Florence (2015-17), Global Hauser Fellow at the New York University Law School (2016-17), and Fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program (2017-18). She was trained as a sinologist and political scientist in Italy (University La Sapienza, Ca’ Foscari University, University of Bologna), the UK (Erasmus scholarship at the School of Oriental and African Studies) and China (Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Scholarship). After having spent one year as visiting doctoral researcher at NYU she completed her Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of Hong Kong, where she was a recipient of the Hong Kong Government Ph.D. Fellowship, the Swire Scholarship, and the Award for Outstanding Research Postgraduate Student for 2015-16.

Web page: https://mariadelecarrai.com/

Università degli Studi di Bari

Books in Byzantium: in search of libraries

2006-2007

Losacco (Bari, 1974) is lecturer in Classical Philology at the University of Bari. She graduated in 1996 in Classical Philology; in 1998 she obtained the Diploma of Greek Palaeographer at the "Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia"; in 2000 she passed the final exam for her Ph.D. in Classical Philology at the University of Bari. In 2003 she joined the European project «Rinascimento virtuale» for the cataloguing of Greek palimpsests in European libraries. Her scientific activity has regarded the history of transmission of classical and Byzantine Greek texts, from the Middle Ages up to modern times, and their manuscript tradition. She concentrated her work mostly on the huge corpus of the Byzantine patriarch Photius. Among her publications are the volume Antonio Catiforo e Giovanni Veludo interpreti di Fozio (Edizioni Dedalo, Bari, 2003) and articles on topics related to the history of transmission of Byzantine texts in international journals, such as the Revue d'histoire des textes, Thesaurismata, Quaderni di Storia. At present she is working on a comprehensive study of the Greek manuscript collection preserved in the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna, and doing extensive research about manuscripts (from the 11th to the 15th centuries) containing excerpts of Photius' so-called Library. At the Italian Academy she will be focusing her research on the history of books, libraries, and culture in the Byzantine age, starting from a significant case-study such the Byzantine tradition of Photius' Library.

University of Turin (Italy)

Emotional contagion: neural pathways and computational models for non-conscious social processing

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Marco Tamietto is Professor of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at the University of Torino, Italy, and Research Fellow at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. After obtaining his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Torino, he completed postdoctoral research at Tilburg University. He has held visiting and honorary positions at the University of Oxford (2015–⁠2018), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, 2018–⁠2019), and served as fellow in residence at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome (2021–⁠2024). He previously directed the doctoral school of psychology and is currently Director of the Neuroscience Institute of Turin.

His research investigates the neural mechanisms underlying emotion perception, visual awareness, and neuroplasticity, particularly following cortical blindness in both human and non-human primates. His work has received significant funding from prestigious institutions such as the European Research Council (ERC) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Further details can be found at: https://www.marcotamietto.com.

The Morgan Library & Museum

Cultural differences in the eyes of a 16th-century draftsman: Federico Zuccaro's travel sketchbooks and drawings 

2018-2019: Fall

Marco Simone Bolzoni received his Ph.D. from the University of Naples Federico II. His interest and expertise focus on the materials, styles, and functions of Italian Renaissance and Baroque drawings.
He is the author of Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino: maestro del disegno (2013), and of numerous articles dedicated to the theory and practice of drawing sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy.
He was a fellow at the Fondazione Longhi in Florence (2008), the Frick Art Reference Library – Center for the History of Collecting (2013), Villa I Tatti (2015). More recently he worked as the Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum (2016-2018). Here he curated the exhibition Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing, and was author of the accompanying catalogue.

Università di Bologna

Techniques for structural damage identification on the basis of uncertain data

2011-2012: Spring

Co-sponsored by the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

Marco Savoia has been Full Professor of Structural Engineering at DISTART, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna (Italy) since 2000, where he teaches Structural Engineering, Advanced Design of Structures and Earthquake Engineering (in English). He is currently doing his scientific research at the same university. Previously he held the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna (1992-1998) and Associate Professor at the University of Parma (1998-2000). He has been a Visiting Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (1990, 1997), Texas A&M University (1993), the University of Virginia (1997), and Florida Atlantic University (2003, 2004). He gave a number of seminars and short courses in those universities. 

From 2001 to 2010, Marco Savoia has been the Coordinator of the Structural Tests Laboratory of the DISTART Department of the University of Bologna. He is presently the Director of the Building & Construction Interdepartmental Center of Applied Research (CIRI) of the University of Bologna.

He is author of about 250 scientific papers, more than 60 in international journals with referees. He is presently the director of two research projects, one funded by the Reluis consortium (Civil Protection Department) on the seismic vulnerability of existing RC buildings, and one funded by the European Community on the fatigue behavior of steel railway bridges.

He is a Member of the CNR Commission for Codes and Guidelines (since 2009), and a Member of the Science Academy of Bologna (since 2007). From 2004 to 2007, he was an expert member of the National Council of Public Works.

Since 2007 he has been the Chairman of the Civil Engineering Higher Education program of the Faculty of Engineering. He promoted the International Master in Civil Engineering, as well as the Dual Degree program together with the Columbia University in New York. He is presently the Coordinator of a European Project Erasmus – Curriculum Development action named "SASICE – Safety and Sustainability in Civil Engineering," uniting 9 universities in Europe.

His main research topics are in the area of seismic engineering, innovative systems for seismic protection, computational modeling of reinforced concrete structures, reliability and stability of structures, composite structures, damage in concrete material and structures, advanced technologies for concrete, identification techniques, and health monitoring of structures.

Università Federico II di Napoli

Co-sponsored by the Business School, Columbia University

The regulation and performance of financial markets

2008-2009: Spring

Marco Pagano is Professor of Economics at University of Naples Federico II, President of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and the European Economic Association (EEA). He holds a B.A. from Cambridge University (1981) and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT (1986), and taught at Bocconi University and the University of Salerno.
Together with Josef Zechner, he is managing editor of the Review of Finance, the journal of the European Finance Association. In 1997 he was awarded the BACOB European Prize for Economic and Financial Research, jointly with Ailsa Röell. He chairs the Scientific Committee of EuroMTS and is a member of the Research Board of Unicredit Group. In the past, he advised the Italian Treasury on the reform of security markets (1995-96), and was a member of the Treasury's privatisation committee (1997-2001) and of the EU Parliament advisory panel on financial services (2002-04).
Most of his research is in the area of financial economics, especially in the fields of stock market microstructure, banking and corporate finance. He has also done research in macroeconomics, especially on its interactions with financial markets. His publications have appeared in several journals, such as American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Review, and Economic Journal.

Università del Piemonte Orientale

The Cold War and the Selling of the "Atlantic community" in American Photojournalism and Magazines: the Case of Italy, 1946-1956

2003-2004

Marco Mariano (1968) is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Literature of the Università del Piemonte Orientale-Vercelli and a member of the "Piero Bairati" Center for American and Euro-American Studies (cisi.unito.it/bairati). He received a degree in Political Science from the University of Turin and a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Genoa. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of History of Columbia University (2000). His publications on American intellectual history and historiography include: Lo storico nel suo labirinto: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tra storia, impegno civile e politica (The Historian in His Labyrinth: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., History, Public Commitment and Politics), Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999, and on Euro-American relations and American journalism: Europa e Stati Uniti secondo il New York Times: La corrispondenza estera di Anne O'Hare McCormick, 1920-1954 (Europe and the United States according to the New York Times: The Foreign Correspondence of Anne O'Hare McCormick, 1920-1954) Turin: Otto, 2001 (with F. Pinelli), as well as several essays on the relations between the United States and Italy in the postwar years. At the Italian Academy his work will explore the place of Italy in the "Atlantic community" in the context of its popularization by mainstream American magazines during the Cold War.

Università degli Studi di Trieste

The economic effects of imperial property in Roman Italy

2007-2008

Marco Maiuro (living in Rome), studies Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology at the Universities of Perugia, Siena, Freiburg (Germany), Trieste and Clermont-Ferrand. PhD Thesis (Trieste and Clermont) on Economic History of Imperial Italy ("La proprietà imperiale in Italia: un'interpretazione storica") soon to be published; collaborates with Universities of Rome and Viterbo (Roman History, professors Lo Cascio and de Romanis) and, since 2006, Field Director at the Archaeological Mission at Villamagna (University of Pennsylvania, BSR, AIAC). Articles published on ancient topography of Rome, on Economic History of the Roman Empire, on cultural change in the Imperial Period. A new archaeological guide of the suburbs of Rome (together with F. Coarelli) is in preparation. Interests focused also on History, Epigraphy and Archaology of the Eastern and African Provinces of the Roman Empire from the Hellenistic Period to Late Antique.

Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)

Imperial lararia and their religious landscape

2022-2023: Fall

I am a scholar interested in social and economic topics of the history, mainly ancient, of the Mediterranean basin. Matters such as fiscal policies of Hellenistic and Roman states, agrarian outputs of premodern farming enterprises, social mobility, demography, rates of urbanization across space and time, and the role of the State in copying with such issues have always been the center of my scholarly output. I am currently professor of Roman History at Sapienza, University of Rome, after having spent several years of research and teaching in the U.S. and research in Germany, the U.K., France, Spain and Greece. I am currently directing programs of research in Italy (Hadrian’s villa) and Kosovo (Ulpiana), programs of research and teaching on Late Antiquity (CAF Tarda Antichità, Sapienza, Rome), and a scholarly series of books on social and economic history of the ancient world (Pragmateiai). As of late 2022, I am finishing up the editorial work of two Oxford Handbooks and completing a monograph on monetary history of the Roman world (with E. Lo Cascio) for CUP.

Università di Milano

Machiavelli, the disappearance of the Etruscans, and the destructive force of religions

2016-2017: Fall

Marco Geuna has been an Associate Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy in the State University of Milan since 2000. The author and editor of several books, he has published articles on modern political philosophers, on the republican tradition and neo-republicanism, and on the just war tradition and its critics.

In recent years he has focused his research on Machiavelli’s ideas and on the relationship between religion and politics in modern philosophies. Working for a semester at the Italian Academy will enable him not only to continue the line of research he has been following for some time, but also to put together and write the first chapter of a larger work dedicated to the genealogy of the relationship between religion and violence in modern thought.

Web page: http://dipartimento.filosofia.unimi.it/index.php/marco-geuna

Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza'

Emotions and power: the system of images in Rome from the mid to the late Republican era (3rd-1st century B.C.)

2007-2008

Marco Galli is Doctor in Classical Art and Archaeology (1998, PhD in Classical Archaeology, Univ. of Cologne (D); 1987 M.A. in Classics, Univ. of Bologna) 

CURRENT POSITION: 2003- Univ. of Roma, 'La Sapienza', Fixed Term Professor in Classical Art and Archaeology. 2005- Member of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, Saidu Sharif-Swat (ISIAO Rome). 2002- Research Affiliate of ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la documentazione). PREVIOUS POSITIONS 2002/2003: Teaching Assistant of Prof. P. Pensabene, Univ. of Rome, 'La Sapienza'. 2001-2002: Univ. of Viterbo, Research Affiliate. Research Project "Sculpture and Context". 1999-2001: Research Affiliate of the German Research Society (DFG). Research Project "Domestic Culture in North Italy", Research Program 'Urban Culture in the Roman Empire' directed by P. Zanker, DAI Rome. 1998-1999: Research-Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf, Research Program (P. Zanker, DAI Rome). 1997-1998: Tutor in Classical Archaeology, Archaeological Institute, Univ. of Cologne. GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS: 1997: Junior Research Fellowship, École Fran"aise at Athens. 1994-1997: Junior Research Fellowship, Archaeological Institute of the Univ. of Cologne. Research Program 'Formation and Self-representation of the Urban Elites in the Roman Empire,' directed by H. v. Hesberg, financed by the German Research Society (DFG). 

Research themes: Roman Architecture and Sculpture of the Hellenistic/Republican and Imperial Ages (particularly in Italy and Greece). Terminology of Ancient Architectural Terms (Project ICCD Rome). Evergetism and history of mentality in the Second Century AD: The Phenomenon of the Second Sophistic. Transformations of the Sacred Space during the Roman Period in the Greek East. Phenomenon of the Religious Associations in the Roman Empire. Domestic Space and Material Culture of the Roman House. Graeco-Roman Pattern in Early Buddhist Art of Gandhara. Historiography of Classical Archaeology: A. Riegl and the Biology of Image. 

Recent monographies and articles
-Die Lebenswelt eines Sophisten. Untersuchungen zu den Bauten und Stiftungen des Herodes Atticus (Philipp von Zabern Verlag, Mainz am Rhein, 2002)
-O. D. Cordovana - M. Galli (a cura di), Arte e memoria culturale nell'età della Seconda Sofistica, Catania 2007.
-P. Callieri, L. Colliva, M. Galli et al. (a cura di), Valli della Memoria. Antiche genti Luoghi Immagini nello Swat. 50 della Missione Archeologica in Pakistan. Catalogo della mostra documentaria, Roma, IsIAO 14.12.2006, Roma 2006.
-Hellenistic Court Imagery in Early Buddhist Art of Gandhara, in P. Calieri (a cura di) Atti del XIX International Conference on South Asian Archaeology, Ravenna 2-6 July 2007 (i.s.)
-Riegl e la "Biologia" delle immagini, in Alois Riegl (1858-1905), Un secolo dopo, Convegno internazionale 30.11-2.12-2005, Accademia dei Lincei Roma (i.s.)
- Processi della memoria nell'età della Seconda Sofistica, in O. Cordovana - M. Galli (a cura di), Arte e memoria culturale nell'età della Seconda Sofistica, Catania 2007, pagg. 7-14
- Et Greci quidem eum consecraverunt. La creazione del mito di Antinoo, in O. Cordovana - M. Galli (a cura di), Arte e memoria culturale nell'età della Seconda Sofistica, Catania 2007, 181-203
-Teatro della memoria: mito e paideia sul sarcofago di Velletri, in: M. Angle, A. Germano, F. Zevi (a cura di), Museo & Territorio, Atti del IV convegno, Velletri 7-8 maggio 2004, Roma 2005, 75-90.
-Vasellame domestico e Lebenswelt: nascita della cultura urbana nella colonia romana di Ariminum, in: P. Zanker - R. Neudecker (Hrsg.) Lebenswelten. Bilder und R"ume in der r"mischen Stadt der Kaiserzeit, Palilia Bd. 16, Wiesbaden 2005, 153-173
-Pilgrimage as lite Habitus: Educated Pilgrims in the Sacred Landscape During the Second Sophistic, in: J. Elsner-I. Rutherford (eds.), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman & Early Christian Antiquity. Seeing the Gods, Oxford 2005, 253-290
-'Creating Religious identities' paideia e religione nella Seconda Sofistica, in: B. E. Borg (ed.), Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Millennium Studies II, Berlin-New York 2004, 315-356

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Gunpowder and the book: the art of war in Europe from the 4th through the 16th centuries

2008-2009

Marco Formisano completed his undergraduate studies in Classics in Palermo (Italy) and in Paris (Université de Paris VII, Jussieu) and received his PhD from the University of Palermo. After graduating and before starting the doctorate, he was awarded a fellowship which allowed him to go to Berlin as a visiting student at the Freie Universität: this marked the beginning of a close connection with Germany that continues to this day. Since then he has won various grants that have allowed me to spend long periods of time in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg), in the US (Brown, Yale, NYU) and in the UK as a Frances Yates Fellow at Warburg Institute. Currently he has a position as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Cooperative Research Center (SFB) "Transformations of Antiquity" at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. His areas of interest are ancient technical writing; late antiquity; art of war; classical tradition in the Renaissance; martyrological literature (esp. Perpetua); panegyric; autobiography; literary theory; marginal texts. He published a monograph on late Roman technical literature ("Tecnica e scrittura", Rome 2001), an edition of Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris (Milan, 2003) and of the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Milan 2008) and is co-editor of a collection of papers with the title "Perpetua’s Passions. Pluridisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (with J. N. Bremmer, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009) and of another on "War in Words. Die Transformationen des Krieges von der Antike bis zur Frühneuzeit (with H. Böhme, De Gruyter Verlag, forthcoming 2009). Currently he is working on another monograph on the art of war in antiquity and in the Renaissance.

Università di Torino

Perinatal stress effects on emotional circuits in juvenile depression 

2018-2019: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Marco Cambiaghi was born in Como in 1981. He is a neuroscience research fellow at the University of Turin, Italy, working on the storage of emotional memories. He got his degree in Biology at the University of Milan and a PhD in Neuroscience and Experimental Neurology at the San Raffaele University in Milan. He performed his research at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute of Milan and at the University of Turin, gaining experience in in-vivo electrophysiological techniques, rodent behavior and brain stimulation. He has worked as a visiting scientist at the City University of New York, Columbia University and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In addition to his research, he has a strong interest in the history of science and in scientific dissemination; he collaborates with two Italian newspapers (La Stampa and La Provincia di Como, where he has published more than 200 articles since 2004) and he is one of the founders of the scientific Festival della Luce (Light Festival), held in Como since 2013.

During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will focus on the effects of perinatal stress on adolescent depression development in a murine preclinical model. In particular, he will investigate brain emotional circuits through behavioral and neurophysiological analysis.

Wesleyan University

Images of power in Renaissance Italy from Federico da Montefeltro to Clement VII

2006-2007

Simonetta, currently an Assistant Professor of Italian at Wesleyan University, took a first degree in history of ideas at the University of Rome La Sapienza (1993) and a Ph.D. in Italian literature at Yale University (2001). His thesis, on the figure of the humanist secretary in the Renaissance, was published as "Rinascimento segreto. Il mondo del Segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli" by Franco Angeli (2004). Co-editor of Pope Pius II's "Memoirs" in the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press), he is the author of numerous articles on various aspects of the "Machiavelli Age" and most notably of "Federico da Montefeltro contro Firenze. Retroscena inediti della congiura dei Pazzi," in the Archivio storico italiano (2003), featuring his discovery of a deciphered letter which led to widespread media coverage (La Repubblica, The Independent, El Pais, The New York Times) and to a documentary aired by the History Channel. He has just completed a book on the Pazzi Conspiracy and its intricate background, entitled "Montefeltro. A Coded Conspiracy, the Medici, and the Sistine Chapel." He is now curating an exhibition on Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro's Library at the Pierpont Morgan Library, in New York City, slated to open in Spring 2007.

Collège de France

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Christianity and its images: from acheiropoieta to photography

2007-2008: Fall

Officer of the Légion d'honneur
Commander of L'ordre national du Mérite
Commander of the Palmes Académiques
Commander of Arts and Letters
Honorable Academician of the Accademia Clementina
Honorable Academician of the Académie d'Aix-en-Provence
Member of the Accademia dei Lincei (1997)
Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy

Born in Marseilles on 10 June 1932, Marc Fumaroli spent his childhood and adolescence in Fès. His mother was his first teacher. He completed his secondary education and Baccalauréat in Letters at the Lycée Ville-Nouvelle in Fès. He completed his higher education at the Lycée Thiers in Marseilles, at the University of Aix-en-Provence and at the Sorbonne. He passed the Agrégation in Classical Letters in 1958. He did his military service at the École militaire interarmes de Cõetquidan and in the 6th Artillery Regiment in Colbert in the Constantinois between September 1958 and January 1961. He was pensionnaire of the Fondation Thiers from September 1963 to August 1966. He was elected assistant of the Faculty of Letters at Lille at his return in 1965, and Doctor of Letters at IV-Sorbonne in June 1976. During the same month he was elected master of conferences at the Paris IV-Sorbonne, succeeding Professor Raymond Picard. Director of the journal, XVIIe siècle (1976-1986) and member of the editorial board of the journal Commentaire (1978-1995), under the directorship of Raymond Aron until his death in 1983 and thereafter under that of Jean-Claude Casanova. 

In 1986 Marc Fumaroli was elected professor of the Collège de France, to which he was presented by the poet Yves Bonnefoy and the historian Jean Delumeau, and was granted the chair entitled "Rhetoric and Society in Europe (16th-17th centuries)." In 1977 he participated in the foundation of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, over which he presided between 1984 and 85, and organized the Third International Congress at Tours in the last-mentioned year. He served as director of Centre d'étude de la langue et de la literature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris IV-C.N.R.S.) from 1984-1994. From 1993 to 1999, he was president of the Association pour la sauvegarde des enseignements littéraires (S.E.L.) founded by Mme. Jacqueline de Romilly. After 2000 he succeeded René Pomeau as president of the Society of Literary History of France. He has presided over the Association of the Friends of the Louvre since 1996. In October 2006 he succeeded the Lord Chancellor Gabriel de Broglie as the president of the Interministerial Commission of Technology. 

He was a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford in 1983 and a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1984. He has taught and delivered lectures in numerous universities in the United States (most notably at New York University, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton, Houston, Los Angeles). Invited by Allan Bloom, he delivered a series of lectures in the division known as the Committee for Social Thought in Chicago of which he became a member, with the status of a professor of the university 'at large', where he teaches two months a year. He has been invited to lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., most notably in the Fifteenth Anniversary Lecture Series. He returned there in March-April 2000 to deliver the six Mellon Series Lectures of that year. He gave the Casal Lecture at the University of London and the Zaharoff Lecture at the University of Oxford in 1991. Each year in May he gives a series of lectures at the Istituto di Studi Filosofici founded and directed by M. Gerardo Marotta, and participates frequently in the congresses at the Cini Foundation in Venice. He has received invitations from most Italian universities. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Naples (Federico II) in 1994, from the University of Bologna in 1999, from the University of Genoa and the University Complutense in Madrid in 2004, and the University Complutense in Madrid in 2005, and his courses at the Collège de France have twice been given in Italian universities: the University of Rome in 1995-1996; and the Scuola normale superiore in Pisa in 1999-2000. Since his youth he has considered Italy his second homeland, and is proud of counting among his innumerable friends there, Professor Tullio Gregory, Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Rome - la Sapienza. He is a member of numerous learned societies in France and abroad. He is an associate member of the British Academy, member of the American Academy of Science, Letters and Arts, member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since 1997), and he is president of the Société littéraire de la France, and a frequent collaborator in the Revue. He regularly contributes articles to daily and weekly newspapers in France and abroad. In 1982 he received the Monsieur Marcel prize from the Académie française and in 1992 its Critique award. He received the Balzan prize in September 2001, the Lafue prize in 2002, and the Mémorial and Combourg prizes in 2004. 

On March 2nd 1995 the Académie française elected him to the sixth chair, in which he succeeded Eugène Ionesco. In 1998 he was elected to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in the chair left vacant by Georges Duby.

Collège de France

2009-2010

Distinguished Senior Research Scholar

Officer of the Légion d'honneur
Commander of L'ordre national du Mérite
Commander of the Palmes Académiques
Commander of Arts and Letters
Honorable Academician of the Accademia Clementina
Honorable Academician of the Académie d'Aix-en-Provence
Member of the Accademia dei Lincei (1997)
Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy

Born in Marseilles on 10 June 1932, Marc Fumaroli spent his childhood and adolescence in Fès. His mother was his first teacher. He completed his secondary education and Baccalauréat in Letters at the Lycée Ville-Nouvelle in Fès. He completed his higher education at the Lycée Thiers in Marseilles, at the University of Aix-en-Provence and at the Sorbonne. He passed the Agrégation in Classical Letters in 1958. He did his military service at the École militaire interarmes de Cõetquidan and in the 6th Artillery Regiment in Colbert in the Constantinois between September 1958 and January 1961. He was pensionnaire of the Fondation Thiers from September 1963 to August 1966. He was elected assistant of the Faculty of Letters at Lille at his return in 1965, and Doctor of Letters at IV-Sorbonne in June 1976. During the same month he was elected master of conferences at the Paris IV-Sorbonne, succeeding Professor Raymond Picard. Director of the journal, XVIIe siècle (1976-1986) and member of the editorial board of the journal Commentaire (1978-1995), under the directorship of Raymond Aron until his death in 1983 and thereafter under that of Jean-Claude Casanova. 

In 1986 Marc Fumaroli was elected professor of the Collège de France, to which he was presented by the poet Yves Bonnefoy and the historian Jean Delumeau, and was granted the chair entitled "Rhetoric and Society in Europe (16th-17th centuries)." In 1977 he participated in the foundation of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, over which he presided between 1984 and 85, and organized the Third International Congress at Tours in the last-mentioned year. He served as director of Centre d'étude de la langue et de la literature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris IV-C.N.R.S.) from 1984-1994. From 1993 to 1999, he was president of the Association pour la sauvegarde des enseignements littéraires (S.E.L.) founded by Mme. Jacqueline de Romilly. After 2000 he succeeded René Pomeau as president of the Society of Literary History of France. He has presided over the Association of the Friends of the Louvre since 1996. In October 2006 he succeeded the Lord Chancellor Gabriel de Broglie as the president of the Interministerial Commission of Technology. 

He was a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford in 1983 and a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1984. He has taught and delivered lectures in numerous universities in the United States (most notably at New York University, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton, Houston, Los Angeles). Invited by Allan Bloom, he delivered a series of lectures in the division known as the Committee for Social Thought in Chicago of which he became a member, with the status of a professor of the university 'at large', where he teaches two months a year. He has been invited to lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., most notably in the Fifteenth Anniversary Lecture Series. He returned there in March-April 2000 to deliver the six Mellon Series Lectures of that year. He gave the Casal Lecture at the University of London and the Zaharoff Lecture at the University of Oxford in 1991. Each year in May he gives a series of lectures at the Istituto di Studi Filosofici founded and directed by M. Gerardo Marotta, and participates frequently in the congresses at the Cini Foundation in Venice. He has received invitations from most Italian universities. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Naples (Federico II) in 1994, from the University of Bologna in 1999, from the University of Genoa and the University Complutense in Madrid in 2004, and the University Complutense in Madrid in 2005, and his courses at the Collège de France have twice been given in Italian universities: the University of Rome in 1995-1996; and the Scuola normale superiore in Pisa in 1999-2000. Since his youth he has considered Italy his second homeland, and is proud of counting among his innumerable friends there, Professor Tullio Gregory, Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Rome - la Sapienza. He is a member of numerous learned societies in France and abroad. He is an associate member of the British Academy, member of the American Academy of Science, Letters and Arts, member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since 1997), and he is president of the Société littéraire de la France, and a frequent collaborator in the Revue. He regularly contributes articles to daily and weekly newspapers in France and abroad. In 1982 he received the Monsieur Marcel prize from the Académie française and in 1992 its Critique award. He received the Balzan prize in September 2001, the Lafue prize in 2002, and the Mémorial and Combourg prizes in 2004. 

On March 2nd 1995 the Académie française elected him to the sixth chair, in which he succeeded Eugène Ionesco. In 1998 he was elected to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in the chair left vacant by Georges Duby.

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

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Law, politics, and physiognomy from the 16th to the 18th centuries: a study of Giovanni Ingegneri’s works

2015-2016: Fall

Fellow for the Academy project “Law and its Manifestations”

Manuela Bragagnolo is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire d’Excellence COMOD (Constitution de la modernité) at the University of Lyon (2014-2015) and a member of the research lab Triangle, at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon. She received her Ph.D in Legal Studies and History of Political Thought from the University of Trento in 2009. After her Ph.D studies she received grants for research from the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and from the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation in Geneva. She was Substitute Professor of Christian Latin Language and Culture at the University of Geneva and member of the academic staff of the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation (IHR)(2014-2015). She is member of EMoDIR (Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism) and of Laboratoire Italien‘s editorial staff. She is working on a book on the importance of Italian Renaissance culture in the 18th century, particularly in Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s legal, political and religious thought. Her fields of interest include history of legal, political and religious thought between the 16th and the 18th centuries, as well as history of medicine and physiognomy. Her project at the Italian Academy aims to investigate the links between law and physiognomy in Renaissance Italy.

Web page: https://ens-lyon.academia.edu/ManuelaBragagnolo

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

The Louvre on fire: history of a false report

2016-2017: Spring

Manfred Posani Löwenstein received his Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 2015 with a thesis on the concept of the unconscious in the historiography of Jacob Burckhardt. He is currently working on both the French and Italian critical editions of Nietzsche’s philological writings (Les Belles Lettres, Adelphi). At the Italian Academy he will investigate the reactions raised by the false report of the burning of the Louvre during the Paris Commune (1871).

Web page: https://scuola.academia.edu/ManfredPosaniLöwenstein

Universität Göttingen (Germany)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Emulation or conservation? Conflicts over the preservation of ancient church buildings in the society of early medieval Rome, 700–850

2023–2024: Spring

Manfred Luchterhandt studied art history, archaeology, literature and history in Würzburg, Padua, and Rome, where he completed his studies in 1997 as a scholarship holder of the Bibliotheca Hertziana with a dissertation on the Romanesque cathedral of Parma. In 1998 he received the Otto Hahn-Medal from the Max Planck-Society for this monograph. From 1997 to 2001 he worked as assistant professor at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome before moving to the University of Münster, where he received his Habilitation in 2007 with a study on papal court culture around 800. In 2011 he was appointed professor of medieval art history at the University of Göttingen with a special focus on the Mediterranean. His current research focuses on early medieval Rome in its cultural relations with Byzantium and the Middle East.

Manfred Luchterhandt has received numerous prizes, grants and fellowships (Rome, Erlangen, Dumbarton Oaks, Near East, etc.) and, in addition to his research and teaching activities, has participated in several international exhibitions and curated his own exhibitions. In 2017–2020 he served as Dean of the Philosophical Faculty and was a member of various university management committees. In 2023 he was elected Speaker of the Senate of the University of Göttingen.

Centre Jean Pépin, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS; France)

Avicenna's political uses in Renaissance Italy 

2026–2027: 12 months

Mali Caterina Alinejad Zanjani (PhD, École Normale Supérieure de Paris, 2025) is a philosopher and historian of thought whose research focuses on the circulation of medieval Arabic philosophy in early modern Europe. Her work lies at the intersection of psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and the history of textual transmission across linguistic and cultural boundaries. She is an associate member of the Centre Jean Pépin (CNRS–ENS).

At the Italian Academy, her current book project, Avicenna’s Political Uses in Renaissance Italy: From Individual to Collective Political Subjectivity, proposes a philosophical and historical study of the reception of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) in the sixteenth-century Italian peninsula. It examines how Avicenna’s theory of the soul was reinterpreted by Renaissance thinkers and explores its ethical and theological-political implications, tracing a movement from an individual ethical framework toward a collective political dimension. Following this shift, the project sheds light on the influence of Avicenna’s philosophy on the development of concepts such as collective imagination, political persuasion, and, more broadly, the formation of modern political subjectivity.

Her research has received support from the École Normale Supérieure, the École Française de Rome, the Vittore Branca International Center for the Study of Italian Culture (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice), the Graduate Program Translitterae–PSL, and the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples. She has also served as an adjunct lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the École Normale Supérieure.

Website: https://umr8230.cnrs.fr/membres/mali-alinejad-zanjani/

Columbia University

Investigating the physiology of dopamine neurons in pre-clinical Parkinson's Disease

2016-2017: Spring

Mahalakshmi Somayaji is a postdoctoral research scientist at the department of Molecular Therapeutics, Columbia University, New York. She obtained Ph.D in Biochemistry, Chemistry and Pharmacy from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. The main research focus during her graduate studies was in the development of experimental mouse models relevant to Parkinson disease (PD) and to understand the etiology of PD. She investigated the physiology of dopaminergic (DA) neurons, the loss of which results in the onset and pathogenesis of PD. Her research was the first to identify the precise anatomical localization and in vivo physiology of DA neurons, to understand differential pre-symptomatic vulnerability in response to stressors in PD. Her postdoctoral research includes understanding the synaptic physiology of DA neurons in the pre-symptomatic mouse models of PD and to investigate the role of DA pathway in regulating appetite.

List of her peer-reviewed publications: (Maiden name: Mahalakshmi Subramaniam)

Book Chapter

• Subramaniam^*, M., Roeper, J. “Subtypes of midbrain dopamine neurons”, Handbook of Basal Ganglia Structure and Function, Second Edition (2016).

Papers in Peer-Reviewed Journals

• Subramaniam^*, M., Althof, D., Gispert, S., Schwenk, J., Auburger, G., Kulik, A., & Roeper, J. (2014). Mutant α-synuclein enhances firing frequencies in dopamine substantia nigra neurons by oxidative impairment of A-type potassium channels. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(41), 13586-99.
• Subramaniam^*, M., Kern, B., Vogel, S., Klose, V., Schneider, G., & Roeper, J. (2014). Selective increase of in vivo firing frequencies in DA SN neurons after proteasome inhibition in the ventral midbrain. European Journal of Neuroscience, 40(6), 2898-2909.
• Dominguez-Bautista, J. A., Klinkenberg, M., Brehm, N., Subramaniam^*, M., Kern, B., Roeper, J., Auburger, G & Jendrach, M. (2015). Loss of lysosome-associated membrane protein 3 (LAMP3) enhances cellular vulnerability against proteasomal inhibition. European journal of cell biology, 94(3), 148-61.
• Aishwarya, S., Mahalakshmi, S^*, & Sehgal, P. K. (2008). Collagen-coated polycaprolactone microparticles as a controlled drug delivery system. Journal of microencapsulation, 25(5), 298-306.

National University of Mongolia

A comparative study of social life and religious beliefs in Italy and Mongolia

2009-2010: Fall

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

A professor at the National University of Mongolia (NUM), she got an M.A. at Saint Petersburg University's Faculty of Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph.D. at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in 1995. In 1983-1995 she was a researcher at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy; since 1996 she has lectured on "Buddhist philosophy," "Philosophy of religion," and "History of Mongolian religion and philosophy" to the Philosophy and Religion Studies students of NUM. She has published seven books and more than 40 academic articles.

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...

Università di Siena

In the footsteps of Momus: irony and vituperio in early modern art criticism

2011-2012

After obtaining her degree (1995) from the University of Pisa, Maddalena Spagnolo attended a three year post graduate course of Specializzazione in Art History 1995-1998. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 2003 under the supervision of Professor Antonio Pinelli. Her thesis "Geografia e storia della fortuna del Correggio 1528-1657" was published as a book in 2005. From 2002-2006, Dr. Spagnolo taught Art Criticism at the University of Siena (Arezzo) and is currently teaching Art History Methods. She also supervised numerous degrees and MA theses. From 1999 onwards, she has been spending a substantial part of each academic year in London, working at the Warburg Institute, where she was awarded a Francis Yates Fellowship in 2005. Additionally, she has been awarded with: British Academy- Accademia dei Lincei in 2004; Villa I Tatti (Harvard University) in 2008; Italian Academy (Columbia University) 2006; Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut) in 2009; Kunsthistorishes Institut (MPI) in 2008, 2010 and 2011. Her research interests are in European Art and Criticism from late 15th to mid 17th century. However, she focuses on History of Reception of Early Modern Works of Art. Dr. Spagnolo is currently preparing a book on the practice of mocking works of art in early modern Italy and France. Furthermore, she has published on this topic in the Proceedings of International Conferences (2006 and 2008), in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2011 (2010) and she has given a number of papers at various conferences, such as the RSA in Los Angeles (2009), the AAH at Glasgow (2010), the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (2008), the Warburg Institute (2005 and 2010), and has co-organized an International workshop, Bild-Witz, with Nicola Suthor and Gerhard Wolf, at the Kunsthistorisches Institut (2010).

Università degli Studi di Siena

Mocking works of art: wit and blame in art criticism from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century

2006-2007

Maddalena Spagnolo graduated in Art History (La fortuna critica di Andrea del Sarto, 1995) and got the Diploma di Specializzazione in Art History at the Università di Pisa (La matita rossa: storia e analisi di un medium grafico e delle sue implicazioni tecniche e stilistiche, 1998). She was awarded a fellowship for one year of Perfezionamento at the Warburg Institute, London (1999). She received the PhD in Art History from the Università di Pisa (Geografia e storia della fortuna di Correggio, 2003). She is currently assegnista di ricerca and Professore a contratto of Art History criticism at the Università di Siena. In the 2004 she was awarded a fellowship from the Accademia dei Lincei- British Academy and in the 2005 she has been a Frances A. Yates Short-Term Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute. Her research deals with the history of reception of works of art, particularly in the XVIth and XVIIth century. In this respect, she has investigated both published and unpublished sources of art history and has studied the relationship between art its audience. She has published in "Ricerche di storia dell'arte", "Arte Lombarda", "APOLLO". She is coauthor of the book The Basilica of Saint Peter's in the Vatican (Modena, 2000) and has coedited Percorsi vasariani fra le arti e le lettere (Siena, 2004). She is author of Correggio. Geografia e storia della fortuna (1528-1657) (Milano, 2005) and Bernini. Il Baldacchino (Modena 2006). She is currently writing a book on art history sources of the XVIth century (Le fonti per la storia dell'arte. Il Cinquecento, Roma, Carocci). At the Italian Academy she will work on the rise of wit and irony in early modern art criticism and will investigate ephemeral texts - sonnets, pamphlets, brochures - written in immediate response to works of art displayed in public spaces.

Universiteit van Amsterdam

The people and the prince: popular politics in early modern Venice

2013-2014: Fall

Maartje van Gelder is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. She studied history at the University of Amsterdam and Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia. In 2007 she was awarded her doctorate for a study of the commercial role and social position of Netherlandish immigrant merchants in early modern Venice, which was published by Brill as Trading Places in 2009. In 2011 she was Honorary Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Currently she is working on popular politics and social unrest in early modern Venice. Her other research interests include the connections between the worlds of early modern commerce and politics, and the practice and theory of cross-confessional diplomacy in Europe and the Mediterranean. She has been awarded fellowships by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the National Maritime Museum Amsterdam, the Marie Curie Programme "The Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean", The Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome and the Datini Institute at Prato.

Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain

Craft heritage and global branding under Chinese hegemony: “Made in Italy” textiles in New York

2016-2017: Fall

Lynda Dematteo graduated from Sciences Po Lille (1996) and obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology under the supervision of Marc Abélès at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris (2002). She undertook an anthropological study of the Northern League based on classic analyses of the rites of inversion. The synthesis of her PhD was published by the French CNRS Éditions under the title: L’idiotie en politique(2007) and by Feltrinelli, L’idiota in politica (2011). After teaching at Lille 3 University, she joined the Montreal Centre for International Studies as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Prof. Mariella Pandolfi. She was recruited by the CNRS in 2008 to carry out studies on the impact of globalization on political life in Europe, particularly by exploring strategies to promote and defend the “Made in Italy” label on a global scale. She aims to highlight the complex and paradoxical links between globalization and the rise of economic patriotism. She participated in a long-term collaborative ethnographic research project with the WTO in Geneva from 2008 to 2010 and she is currently involved in a new collaborative project, “The Political Life of Commodities,” implemented by the Norbert Elias Centre in Marseilles. This international consortium is developing an anthropology of unprecedented transformations in the interplay between economy and politics. Through her ethnography of the “Milano Unica” trade show, Lynda Dematteo reflects on how the internationalization of industrial processes threatens a specific material cultural heritage and changes the meaning that tradespeople give to national identity. In New York City, she will explore the history of relationships established between ethnic business communities to better understand the current emergence of an Italo-Chinese fashion scene.

Web page: http://www.iiac.cnrs.fr/article1928.html

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Toronto; Universita' di Roma 'La Sapienza'

Neo-Gregorian Chant for the Mass in Southern Italy: A Bridge between Old and New Style

2004-2005

Luisa Nardini earned her PhD in Musicology at the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" with a dissertation on the neo-Gregorian chant found in manuscripts from southern Italy (11th-13th centuries). She has received scholarships to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Prof. A.E. Planchart. She was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Santa Barbara, California (2002-2003), where she taught Music History and Notation. In 2003-2004 she was an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where she is currently finishing her postdoctoral Licence in Medieval Studies. She has published articles and delivered conference presentations on Gregorian chant, medieval musical theory, music iconography, early polyphony, and Hildegard von Bingen. She has performance experience as a pianist and choir singer and director. Her project at the Italian Academy will be the preparation of a book containing the edition and study of the neo-Gregorian chants for the Mass in southern Italy from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her previous research on the subject has shed light on some of the most controversial problems regarding the earliest history of Western music and the interrelationships between Roman, Gallican, and Italian chants, as well as on issues of oral and written transmission in the medieval musical culture.

Università degli Studi di Catania

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

The influence of risperidone on emotional stimuli processing in a sample of individuals with autism: a functional MRI study

2006-2007: Fall & Spring

Luigi Mazzone received his Italian degree in Medical School in 1998 at the University of Catania, Italy. He completed his residency in Children's Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Catania in 2003 and discussed a thesis on "Behavioural and temperamental characteristics of children and adolescents suffering from primary headache." In 2001, he worked as a visiting student at the division of child neurology and psychiatry at "Stella Maris" in Pisa, Italy, where he focused his attention on the psychopharmacological treatment of psychiatric disorders in childhood. In 2005-2006 he worked as visiting fellow at the Development and Affective Neuroscience Section of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Bethesda, MD. During this period he worked on the relationship between high levels of Glucocorticoid and psychiatric disorders by using functional magnetic resonance. Currently, he is a PhD student in Clinical Paediatrics at the University of Catania. The main focus of Dr. Luigi Mazzone's research is the use of neuroimaging to identify the mechanisms underlying the neurobiological function of psychiatric disorders in childhood such as Anxiety Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism. During his fellowship at Columbia University, Dr. Luigi Mazzone will use functional MRI to study the alteration in the reward system in patients with ADHD and Anxiety Disorder compared to healthy controls. He was founder and is currently President of the Organization "Progetto AITA," an association of voluntary service that promotes care of Children and Adolescents with Neurological and Psychiatric disease in Italy. He has been member of the Italian Fencing National Team and winner of the Italian National Championship of Fencing in 2002.

Università di Milano

Iconography as Relic: The Transmission of Medieval Images

2005-2006

Ludovico Geymonat works on the role of images in cultural transmission. His research concerns the formation and diffusion of medieval iconography. He graduated in Art History at the Università di Torino (1996) and will receive a PhD in Medieval Art from Princeton University (2005). As professore a contratto, he has taught History of Medieval Art at the Università di Milano (2002-2004). He is the author of "1233 Byzantinizing the Parma Baptistery" (Miscellanea Marciana, 2002) and "Stile e contesto: gli affreschi di San Zan Degol a Venezia" (in Venezia e Bisanzio, Venezia 2005). At the Italian Academy, his research will focus on medieval means of duplicating images and iconography and on the role of model drawings in cultural appropriation.

The Empire architecture firm (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

An American temple

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Ludovico Centis is an architect, founder of the firm The Empire, and co-founder and editor of the architecture magazine San Rocco. He received a PhD in Urbanism from Università IUAV di Venezia and is currently Assistant Professor in Urbanism at the University of Trieste. His research focuses on the ways in which individuals and institutions, as well as desires and power, shape cities and landscapes.

Centis was a partner at the firm Salottobuono from 2007 to 2012; the firm acted as Creative Director of Domus magazine between 2011 and 2012. He was the 2013–⁠14 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the State University of New York–University at Buffalo. During the spring of 2015 Centis was at the Center for Land Use Interpretation as a participant in the Wendover Residence Program. He was awarded a 2018 Getty Library Research Grant at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and a 2020 Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art – Yale University.

Centis has taught at Università Iuav di Venezia, at Politecnico di Milano and at the State University of New York–University at Buffalo. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Università IUAV di Venezia and a Visiting School Head at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London between 2020 and 2022.

Centis has lectured widely in international universities and venues, such as the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism, the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Technische Universität Wien (Vienna), the Architectural Association (London), Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), Bauhaus-Universitaet (Weimar), the University of Chicago, the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, the Kyoto Institute of Technology.

Centis has published essays and papers in refereed journals such as Domus, Town Planning Review, Landscape Journal, Log, OASE, San Rocco, Topos, Arch+, AA Files, and Harvard Design Magazine. Recent books include Reyner Banham: A set of actual tracks (2024, editor), Qualche sembianza e immagine di bellezza. Spazi pubblici e città costiere globali (2024, co-edited with Matteo D’Ambros), The Lake of Venice. A scenario for Venice and its lagoon (2022, co-authored with Lorenzo Fabian), and A parallel of ruins and landscapes (2019).

During his stay at the Italian Academy, Centis will engage with the material and immaterial legacy of the Manhattan Project, and in particular with the joint development by Columbia University and the University of Chicago of the first atomic pile—the Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1). Under the guidance of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, CP-1 went critical on December 2, 1942: the birth date (some say) of the Atomic Age. 

More information: theempire.eu

University of New South Wales

Australia

The Accademia degli Inquieti: an Analysis of Experimental Philosophy in Bologna from 1690 to 1714

2004-2005

Luciano Boschiero graduated with first-class Honours in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Wollongong in 1999. He recently completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales. The title of his doctoral dissertation is: Natural philosophy inside the mid to late seventeenth-century Tuscan court: the history of the Accademia del Cimento. Luciano has had several chapters of his thesis published with international journals specializing in the history and philosophy of science. In 2002 he was the winner of the Annals of Science Prize for the paper: "Natural philosophical contention inside the Accademia del Cimento: the properties and effects of heat and cold." In his post-doctoral appointment at the Italian Academy, Luciano will be researching the rise of experimental philosophy in late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century Italian institutions, with particular focus on the activities of the Accademia degli Inquieti in Bologna. He is interested in the way the Inquieti used experimental philosophy as a persuasive presentational device in order to strengthen its authority in natural philosophical fields and appeal to potential members and patrons.

Northwestern University (USA)

Thinking on one’s feet: embodied cognition in early modern Italy

2024–2025: Fall and Spring

Lucia Delaini researches embodied cognition in the Early Modern, specifically the role of the body in operations of virtue- and knowledge-acquisition. During her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University, she explored 16th-century cognitive beliefs regarding the role of perception, imagination, and space navigation, in processes of knowledge-formation. She is especially interested in practices that involve the body for fast and efficient re-structuring of one's habits and automatisms.

Previous to Northwestern, she earned degrees in Literary Studies and Philology, Comparative Literature, and Communication Sciences, with diverse foci—from Italian history to 20th-century political philosophy and critical theory. Her studies were developed across Europe through various fellowship programs (Universities of Padua and Verona in Italy; Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in Germany; and École Normale Supérieure of Lyon in France), including a tri-lingual Master's program, “Crossways in Cultural Narratives,” sponsored by the EU between the University of Bergamo (Italy), NOVA University Lisbon (Portugal), and the University of Guelph (Canada).

In her Ph.D., Lucia mostly worked with the practices described in Memory Arts manuals. At the Italian Academy, she will examine manuals for dancing and fencing of the Early Modern period, as possible vectors of systematic self-change. Through an analysis of the embodied practices described there, as well as of the theories accompanying them, she will investigate the mechanisms in dance moves and sword-yielding that lead to the acquisition of civic and courtly virtue. In particular, her focus will be on the workings of individual awareness and agency in these collective activities.

Bryn Mawr College (USA)

Resistance to Neo-Platonic innovations and deviant intellectuals in the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici: the case of Luigi Pulci

2024–2025: Spring

Luca Zipoli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Transnational Italian Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he also pursued his undergraduate degree. Before joining Bryn Mawr College, he researched and taught at Princeton University, New York University, and the Princeton Study Abroad Program. His main research interests include Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italian epics and theatre, with a specific focus on the figures of Luigi and Antonia Pulci. He addresses this area of scholarly interest through a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, privileging the intersections of fields such as history and visual arts, comparative literature and trans-medial studies, book history, and gender studies. The relationships between historical events, religious beliefs, and literary culture in Renaissance Florence are the main concern of his book-length project, titled Around The Magnificent: Poetry, Magic and Religion in Early Modern Florence, which he is currently developing from his Ph.D. dissertation thanks to the support of the Italian Academy at Columbia University.

Website: https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/people/luca-zipoli

*Photo by Aaron Windhorst

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin - Institute for Advanced Study (Germany)

The problem of Roman copies: a transatlantic dissent

2022-2023: Fall

I was born in Florence in 1950. I studied Greek and Roman archaeology, Social anthropology and Italian literature in Basel and Munich, receiving my Ph.D. in Basel (1975). For more than ten years I was a curator in the Antikenmuseum in Berlin (West). In 1992, I moved from museum to university, teaching first in Freiburg and then, from 1998 to 2007, at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität in Munich. From 2007 to 2018 I served as rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin - Institute of Advanced Study, where I still hold the position of Permanent Fellow.

Università degli Studi di Siena

The Spread of Italian Economic Thought in the United States

2002-2003

Since November 2000 Luca Fiorito has been a research fellow of economics at the University of Siena. After obtaining his BA (laurea) in economics at the University of Siena, he received a PhD in History of Economic Thought at the University of Florence. He has published several essays on the history of North American economic thought-with particular regard to the history of American institutionalism-and on the international spread of Italian economics. He is the editor of unpublished works of WC Mitchell and ERA Seligman. Currently, at the Italian Academy, he is conducting research on the influence of Italian economic thought in the United States during the years 1890-1940.

Columbia University

The role of smoking in cocaine addiction

2012-2013: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

After receiving his B.Sc. in Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics from the University of Milan, Luca Colnaghi moved to New York City in 2007, where in 2011 he received a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the NYU Langone Medical Center. He is now continuing his studies in the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University. He currently works on the molecular mechanisms of drug addiction and metaplasticity in the brain. Metaplasticity ascertains that past experiences may change synaptic architecture and neural circuitry, so that when another event comes along, it is experienced differently than if the past experience did not occur. He is studying how pre-exposure to nicotine and other drugs affect the systemic response to cocaine.

Mario Negri Institute for Pharmaceutical Research

Milan

Molecular mechanisms for the perpetuation of memory storage

2006-2007

I received a Laurea in Scienze Biologiche from the Università degli Studi di Milano in 2001, where I was trained in Molecular Biology. I received a Specialisation in Biotechnology from the same university in 2004 and a PhD in Pharmacology from the Open University, London, in 2006. From 2001 to 2006 I have been working on molecular and cellular aspects of Familial Prion Disease which affect humans, like Creutzfeld Jacob Disease and Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome, in an attempt to clarify the crucial steps for the appearance of these fatal pathologies, and possibly identifying a cure. My interest in prion molecules made me contact Prof. Eric Kandel, who recently hypothesized that a prion mechanism might be responsible for the persistence of long-term memory (Si et al, 2003). A protein called cytoplasmic polyadenylation element-binding protein (CPEB), a regulator of local protein synthesis, exists in a particular form in the nervous system of Aplysia and stabilizes newly formed synaptic connections. The first 150 amino-acids of CPEB constitute a domain that is very similar to that of prions. Like prions, CPEB can exist in two conformationally distinct isoforms but only one is metabolically active--the dominant form, characterized by an aggregate state. During my stay at the Italian Academy I will test the idea that these aggregates bind to dormant mRNA (ribonucleic acid messenger) resident at the synapse and modify them in order to be translated and give rise to proteins that stabilize synaptic growth. I also plan to examine if the prion domain of CPEB leads to a self-perpetuating level of local translation in neurons and if this novel mechanism leads to the stabilization of learning-related synaptic growth and the persistence of long-term memory and I will try to identify molecules that interact with CPEB and explore how this interaction leads to the activation of dormant mRNA or the conformational changes of CPEB at the neuronal synapse.

Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)

Recurrent feelings: unmarked emotions and reactive sensations

2024–2025: Fall

Lorenzo Sabetta is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sapienza Università di Roma. Before that, he held postdoc and visiting researcher positions in the US (University of Missouri), Sweden (Linköping University), UK (University of Oxford), and Poland (University of Lodz). He works on social theory, history of ideas, and everyday life. His recent publications include: “Activated. Towards a Sociology of Reaction” (European Journal of Social Theory, 2024, with A.M. Brighenti); “On Doing Concept-Driven Sociology” (Symbolic Interaction, 2024, with W. Brekhus); “Brushing Society Against the Grain: Digital Footprints, Scraps, Non-Human Acts, Crumbs, and Other Traces” (American Behavioral Scientist, 2024, with F. Comunello and F. Martire) and Against the Background of Social Reality. Defaults, Commonplaces, and the Sociology of the Unmarked (Routledge, 2023; edited with C. Lombardo). See also https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lorenzo-Sabetta

Website: https://corsidilaurea.uniroma1.it/it/users/lorenzosabettauniroma1it 

Scuola Normale Superiore - Pisa

Art history, natural history, and the science of antiquity: J. J. Winckelmann's recovery of ancient culture in Italy

2010-2011

Lorenzo Lattanzi obtained his PhD in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (2006), where he was later appointed research associate (2007) and post-doctoral fellow in History of Classical Art and Archaeology (2008-2010). He has held research fellowships from the Freie-Universität in Berlin, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München and École Normale SupÉrieure in Paris. In 2010, he was fixed-term Lecturer in Aesthetics in the PhD Program of Management and Development of Cultural Heritage at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca. He wrote two books, L'estetica musicale dell'Illuminismo tedesco (Palermo, 2001), and Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa 2002), which was awarded the "Castiglioncello-Costa dei Tirreni" Philosophy Prize in 2003. He is the author of several papers on eighteenth-century epistemology and aesthetics. In 2004, he also published the first Italian translation of M. Mendelssohn's major aesthetic works. He is currently working on a new Italian translation, with introduction and commentary, of Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums and Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst. His research focuses on modern aesthetics and art criticism within the frame of the history of ideas and studies in the Classical tradition. His current interests include the aesthetics of German Neoclassicism; cultural transfers between French and German Enlightenment theories of sentiment and sensibilitÉ; and the relationship of the Sublime with the ideas of Grace and the Tragic, from ancient rhetoric up to Kant and Schiller.

University of Italian Switzerland (USI; Switzerland)

Iroquois spatial thinking and the political imagination in the Early Modern Atlantic world, 1535–1775

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Lorenzo trained as an architect at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm before completing his PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2024. His dissertation, currently under revision for publication as Jesuit Confessionals in the Early Modern Southern Netherlands: Ritual, Space, and Materiality, was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and received the Promotion Prize from the Swiss Association of Art Historians.

Lorenzo’s current research explores the political resonance of Indigenous North American architecture in the Early Modern Atlantic world, with a focus on Iroquois and Huron town constellations across the Northeast. He has held fellowships at the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut (Florence) and the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London, with forthcoming appointments at Villa I Tatti, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the John Carter Brown Library.

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Worlds upside down: religion and historical imagination in Sierra Leone's diamond mines

2014-2015: Spring

Lorenzo D'Angelo received a Ph.D. in Human Sciences – curr. Anthropology of the Contemporary in 2011 at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Currently, he teaches Cultural Anthropology at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy. He carried out his first researches with undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Since 2007, he has been conducting an historical and ethnographic research on the economic, cultural, ecological and religious aspects of diamond mining in Sierra Leone. His areas of interest include the anthropology of work, commodity chains analysis, and political ecology.
https://independent.academia.edu/LorenzoDAngelo

Princeton University (U.S.A)

Trading empires: imperial state and capitalist merchants in Venice and Egypt, 1000–1350 CE

2020-2021: Spring

Lorenzo Bondioli is a social and economic historian specializing in the medieval Mediterranean and the Middle East. His research destabilizes Eurocentric narratives of capitalist origins by shedding light on the interplay of commercial capital and imperial state structures in the preindustrial world. His doctoral dissertation, “Peasants, Merchants, and Caliphs: Capital and Empire in Fatimid Egypt, 900-1200 CE,” reconstructs the political economy of Egypt at a time when the country was the pivot of the Afro-Eurasian world system. Using the unique evidence afforded by the Cairo Geniza in conjunction with Arabic documentary and literary sources, Bondioli’s work calls for a re-centering of Egypt in the global, longue durée history of capitalism.

At the Italian Academy, Bondioli will work on his next project, investigating the rise of the Venetian merchant class as a development inscribed within the political economy of Mediterranean empires. Bondioli’s long-term ambition is to start an interdisciplinary conversation among scholars working on different extra-European contexts and jointly elaborate a new narrative of the history of capitalism, in order to better understand not only capitalism’s historical origins, but also its current transformations.

Web page: https://history.princeton.edu/people/lorenzo-bondioli

Università di Bologna

Futurism reinterpreted: Classical Literary Myths and the case of Michele Leskovic 

2011-2012: Spring

Lorenza Miretti studied at the University of Bologna and obtained a B.A. in Italian Literature (with an interdisciplinary thesis on the portrait, under Professor Ezio Raimondi in the Faculty of the Humanities, in 1995) and a Ph.D in Italian Studies (working on Michele Leskovic, alias Escodamè, under Professor Paola Daniela Giovanelli at the School of Doctoral Italian Studies, in 2010). She also obtained a Certificate of Specialization in Archival Science, Palaeography and Diplomatics at the Bologna State Archives School (in 1999).

She was a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University's Italian Language & Literature Department in 2008.

Selected grants: International Course of High Culture-Giorgio Cini Institution, Venice (1994, 1995); Italian Department of the University of Bologna-Cassa di Risparmio Institution in Bologna (2005, renewed); Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici (2006); "XIV Marco Polo Program-2008" - University of Bologna.

Selected publications: Mafarka the Futurist. Epos and Vanguard (2005); "Valerio Magrelli," "Silvio Ramat," "Maria Luisa Spaziani," in Encyclopedia of Italian Studies, edited by Gaetana Marrone (2007); "Marcello Marchesi," in Italian Enciclopedia Treccani (2008); "Time and Space didn't Die Yesterday," in Time on the Stage. Actors, Dramaturgies, Events from Eighteenth Century to the Production Age, edited by Paola Daniela Giovanelli (2007, 2008); Francesca Florimbii, Lorenza Miretti (eds.), Lina to Giosue. Fragments of a Correspondence, introduced by Emilio Pasquini (2010).

She is interested in literature, art and culture from the XVIII to the XX century, particularly Futurism, and in the theories of the novel, narrative structure, literary genres and interdisciplinary theories.

Università di Pisa

Computer Networks and Communication

2005-2006

Born in 1950 in Livorno, Italy. Citizen of Italy.
Received the "Laurea in Scienze dell'Informazione" from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1973. She is currently a full professor of computer Science at the University of Pisa.
Since 1973, she was associated as a researcher with the Department of Informatica of the University of Pisa. From 1987 to 1990 she was appointed full professor of computer science at Department of "Informatica e Applicazioni" at the University of Salerno. Since 1990 she joined the Department of Computer Science of Pisa, where she presently teaches courses of "Algorithm and Data Structures" and "Web Algorithms". She was Coordinator of the study programs of the Department of Computer Science of Pisa from 1991 to 1994. During that period the study programs were completely revised.
She has been visiting professor at the National University of Somalia in 1989 and visiting scientist at the Carleton University of Ottawa in Canada in 1991 and at the Ottawa University in 2003. She was also visiting professor at the Botswana University of Gaborone in Botswana in 2004.
In the framework of UNESCO projects of "Informatics for developing countries" she has given basic courses of informatics in many universities of developing countries. As an expert of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she spent several research and teaching periods in Jordan in 1996, 97 and 98 and in Egypt.
She is referee of several international journals and is in the program committee of international conferences. Her research activity, started in the field of data structures and sequential algorithm, has developed in the field of parallel and distributed algorithms and in the relationship between abstract computational models and realistic computers and circuits. The research is attested by around fifty papers published on the main scientific journals. She is co-author of one textbook of large diffusion and of another book on the relationships between algorithmica, other fields of knowledge and normal life.
Recent research papers:
1. P. Crescenzi, A. Del Lungo, R. Grossi, E. Lodi, L. Pagli, G. Rossi, Text Sparsification via Local Maxima, THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE, num. 1, vol. 304, pp. 341-364, 2003
2. A. Bernasconi, V. Ciriani V., F. Luccio, L. Pagli, Three-level logic minimization based on function regularities, IEEE TRANSACTION ON COMPUTER-AIED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, num. 22, vol. 8, pp. 1005-1005, 2003
3. P. Flocchini, E. Lodi, F. Luccio, L. Pagli and N.Santoro, Dynamic Monopolies in Tori, DISCRETE APPLIED MATHEMATICS, vol. 137, pp. 197-212, 2004 4. G. Franceschini, R. Grossi, J.I. Munro, L. Pagli, Implicit B-trees: a new data structure for the dictionary problem, JOURNAL OF COMPUTER AND SYSTEMS SCIENCES INTERNATIONAL, num. 4, vol. 68, pp. 788-807, 2004
5. A. Bernasconi, V. Ciriani, F. Luccio, and L. Pagli, Exploiting Regularities for Boolean Function Synthesis, THEORY OF COMPUTING SYSTEMS, to appear. Books:
6. Luccio F., Pagli L., Algoritmi, divinità e gente comune, ETS, Pisa, 0, 1999

European University Institute

Florence

Jews under Italian occupation: the case of Greece

2006-2007

Lidia Santarelli received her Ph. D. (2005) from the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence, with a dissertation on the Italian occupation of Greece during the Second World War. As Hannah Seeger Davis post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2005-2006), she expanded and revised her thesis for publication as a book-length study; in particular, she completed research on the process of forced Italianization of the Ionian Islands in the years 1941-1943. While at Columbia, she will complete the final stages of this book project entitled "End of the Empire. Fascist War and Occupation of Greece 1940-43."
As a research fellow at the Italian Academy for the academic year 2006-2007, she is carrying out new research for a project entitled "Diplomacy of Aid, Living Space, and the Holocaust: Fascist Italy and the Jews in the Axis-occupied Europe. The Case of Salonika." Based on a vast array of unpublished historical documents, this research explores the controversial policy through which Fascist Italy addressed Jewish communities residing within the territories occupied by the Axis Powers, focusing on both Rhodes and Salonika, the city that housed one of the largest Jewish communities in all of interwar Europe.
Prior to arriving in the United States, she served as Adjunct Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Rome La Sapienza and History of South-Eastern Europe at the University of L'Aquila, where she taught several courses on social and political conflicts in Axis-occupied Europe, Italian Fascism, nations and nationalism in the Balkans, cultures of war, human rights, and globalization. From 1999 to 2002, she was a member of the Research Project on "The Impact of the Nazi and Fascist Rule in Europe, 1938-1950," sponsored by the European Science Foundation. Her research interests include war and society, civil war and ethnic conflicts, Fascist culture and ideology, war crimes, international politics, and systems of occupation, as well as memory and oblivion of traumatic past in transitional periods. She has published widely on the topics related to her research work.

Brown University

On the Fascist Discourse on Law as Art, Religion, and Science

2012-2013: Fall

2006-2007: Spring

Fellow Associate for the Academy project “Law and its Manifestations”

Ben Gurion University

The popular image of Dante as a theologian

2011-2012: Fall

Leon Jacobowitz Efron is Visiting Lecturer of Medieval History as Achva College of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. His dissertation on the religious reception of Dante Alighieri was written at Tel-Aviv University's School for Historical Studies, under the supervision of Dr. Yossef Schwartz (TAU) and Prof. Peter S. Hawkins (Yale). It won Tel-Aviv University's Funkenstein Award for Outstanding and Original Ph.D. Dissertation.
He is interested in late medieval and early modern secular-vernacular thought, and has a particular interest in questions of authority and specifically in lay subversion of ecclesiastic authority in 14th and 15th century texts and art.
Presently he is working on a monograph about the popular image of Dante as a theologian at Columbia University's Italian Academy.

University of California - Berkeley

Blindness, composition, and the conceptualization of music in medieval and early modern Italy

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

I completed a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2015. I am broadly interested in how instrument playing and other everyday modes of experiencing music shape the ways in which musicians conceptualize music and influence the development of musical style. My dissertation, "Keyboard Playing and the Mechanization of Polyphony in Italian Music, Circa 1600," explores the emergence of a keyboard-centric paradigm of music in the late sixteenth century and its role in the development of the "concertato style" in the early decades of the seventeenth century. While at the Italian Academy, I will investigate the role of instruments in the compositional process of blind composers of polyphonic vocal music, particularly the Venetian harpsichordist Martino Pesenti (c.1600-c.1648).

Columbia University

Sardinian Hybrid Memories: A Recapitulation of Conflicting Histories in the Making of the "I"

2002-2003

Leide Porcu received her B.A. in French Literature from the University of Cagliari, Italy. Subsequently, she completed a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation is entitled "The Way We Deal with Harsh Reality: Humor and Theft. The Rhetorics of Stealing, Selling, Hoarding and Humor in the Fish Market of Cagliari, Italy." She is also currently in training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, NY. Her work is interdisciplinary and draws from the theoretical traditions of Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature.
At the Italian Academy, Leide Porcu is studying emigration and imagination. Her work focuses on Sardinian emigration to the Italian Peninsula and New York, and how Sardinian traditions and practices of the past have survived emigration. She is exploring these hybrid traces of history to show how they have empowered and enriched the lives of Sardinians and their sense of self.

Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Crumbling beauty: an environmental history of Italian cinema

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Laura Di Bianco is assistant professor of modern and contemporary Italian studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of film studies, women’s and gender studies, and environmental humanities. She is the author of Wandering Women. Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking (Indiana University Press, 2023) and essays that have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals such as The Italianist, California Italian Studies, Film and Philosophy, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment), and edited volumes, among which are Waste and Discard Studies in the Mediterranean (Peter Lang, 2024) and Ecologia e lavoro (Mimesis, 2023). She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, the Bogliasco Fellowship in the Humanities, the JHU’s Catalyst Award (2020), and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Fellowship (2024–⁠2025).

Laura is also co-editor of the academic journal MLN, Italian (Modern Language Notes).

At the Italian Academy she will be working on her second book project, Crumbling Beauty, An Environmental History of Italian Cinema. Engaging with classic, forgotten, and emergent Italian films, from the silent era to the present, this book will retrieve forgotten memories of traumatic events, reactivate the history of environmentalism and renew vision for the struggle against the climate crisis. 

More information: krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/directory/laura-di-bianco/

Yale University

Fortunato Depero's Multidimensional Spatial Inventions in New York

2004-2005

Laura Chiesa received her Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Pisa and a D.E.A. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In October she will receive her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She is currently a lector in the Italian Department at Yale University. She translated Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler's Ecografie della televisione into Italian. Her article on Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, "Multiple e contrastanti emozioni tra città e puzzle," is forthcoming in the Romanic Review (Fall 2004). At the Italian Academy she will research Fortunato Depero's spatial inventions during his stay in New York (between 1927 and 1930), focusing on the theatrical, architectural and visual dimensions of his work, and situating it within the context of other works of the same period.

Università di Pisa

Genomics of suicidal behavior

2010-2011: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Laura Bevilacqua received her M.D. in 2005 from the University of Pisa, Italy, where she also trained as a psychiatrist. In the last two years she has been a Fogarty fellow in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA, where she focused on functional genomics and in particular on the role of serotonin and dopamine domain genes in impulsivity and dyscontrol towards the identification of functional alleles in addictions and related behaviors.

Università della Tuscia

Conservation and documentation of new media art. Italian tradition and international strategies

2009-2010: Fall

Laura Barreca has taught at the Faculty of Architecture, University "La Sapienza", Rome, as professor of the Course of History of Contemporary Art, in 2009. She is Assistant Professor of the Chair of History of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Conservation of Cultural and Artistic Heritage, University of Viterbo. She works as external consultant for the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali, for the Land Art project "Sensi Contemporanei" (Basilicata 2009). For the MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo she is curator of the project "Committenze contemporanee", in collaboration with UniCredit Group and Galleria Borghese. Since 2007, she worked as Junior Curator at PAN|Palazzo delle Arti Napoli. Since the completion of her Ph.D., she has been writing articles and papers, and has been invited to present lectures in several conferences (Madrid 2007; Montreal 2008; Rome 2008-2009) about "Conservation and Documentation of New Media Art".

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS; France)

Human mobility, climate, and resources in the Afro-Arabian rift system (12,000–2,000 BP)

2022-2023: Fall and Spring

Lamya Khalidi is a Researcher at the CNRS, in the Cultures et Environnements: Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge (CEPAM) laboratory at the University Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006. She is an archaeologist and specialist in the late prehistory of Arabia and the Horn of Africa (12th - 1st millennium BC). Her main research interests and expertise are in environmental and landscape archaeology, with emphasis on the dynamic processes of human transformation and adaptation in response to volcanism, hydroclimate changes and human interactions in East Africa and the Middle East during the Holocene. She is a permanent member of international archaeological programs in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Republic of Djibouti, Syria, and Lebanon. Director of several projects in Yemen between 2002 and 2010, she currently directs the VAPOR-Afar project in Ethiopia. She is co-editor of three books and has authored and co-authored more than sixty scientific and mainstream articles. Her co-edited volumes include From refugia to oases: living in arid environments from prehistoric times to the present day and Contacts Between South Arabia and the Horn of Africa, From the Bronze Age to Islam.

Webpage: https://www.cepam.cnrs.fr/contact/lamya-khalidi/

Ohio State University

The household and the bishop in late antique Rome: space, social practice and the establishment of episcopal authority (ca. 350-700 CE)

2006-2007

Sessa studies the cultural history of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean world from ca. 300-700 CE. She is especially interested in the relationship between early Christianity and social practice, and how new figures of authority, like the Christian bishop, were integrated into pre-existing Roman structures and institutions. She has published on late Roman hagiography and is guest editing a forthcoming special volume of the Journal of Early Christian Studies on Christianity and domestic space in late antiquity. At the Italian Academy, she will be working on her current book project, a study of the relationship between Roman papal authority and the aristocratic household in the city of Rome. She holds degrees from Princeton University (A.B. in Religion, 1992) and from the University of California at Berkeley (M.A. in Medieval History, 1996; Ph.D. in Ancient and Medieval History, 2003). From 2003-2006 she was an assistant professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at Claremont McKenna College and will be joining the faculty in the Department of History at The Ohio State University in the fall of 2007.

University of Benin (Nigeria)

The significance of the Benin Bronzes: before and after 1897 in the repatriation question

2022-2023: Fall

Koki Eghafona has been teaching in the University in Nigeria since 1984 as a cultural anthropologist. Her research interests include: qualitative research methodology; oral literature and ethnography; peoples and cultures of Nigeria and Africa; cultural resource management and indigenous knowledge systems. She has conducted over twenty Social Impact Assessments (SIA) focusing on socio-economic surveys in rural communities. She has over sixty academic publications mainly in the area of culture, tradition, and modern slavery. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Curating Benin Cultural Materials: Towards Integrating Indigenous and Orthodox Methods,” (2001) investigated and highlighted the indigenous curatorial, conservation, and exhibition practices of the Benin people during the pre-colonial era, drawing out similarities that existed with such practices in today's museums. The thesis proposed integration of both indigenous and orthodox ways of caring for Benin cultural objects in museums.

Freie Universität Berlin

Imagining the public: Image policy and its aesthetic foundations in late medieval and early modern Italy

2018-2019: Fall

Klaus Krüger is Professor of Art History at the Freie Universität of Berlin, having previously held positions of Chair at the Universities of Greifswald and Basel, and visiting positions and fellowships in Paris (ÉHÉSS), New York (Columbia University), Konstanz (University/Center of Excellence), Vienna (IFK) and Rome (Bibliotheca Hertziana/Max-Planck-Institute). He is Co-Editor of the book series Historische Semantik and Figura. Ästhetik, Geschichte, Literatur and since 2012 Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Study/Research College BildEvidenz. Geschichte und Ästhetik at the FU Berlin (www.bildevidenz.de). His research interests include the history and cultural status of visual images, in particular their changing role in medieval and early modern times, with special reference to Italian painting and sculpture from the Middle Ages to Baroque (12th-17th century); the origin and early history of the altarpiece; visionary images; and Caravaggio. Further research interests include contemporary art, art and film, and the theories and methodology of art history. Among his book publications are: Bildpräsenz – Heilspräsenz. Ästhetik der Liminalität (2018); Zur Eigensinnlichkeit der Bilder (2017); Grazia. Religiöse Erfahrung und ästhetische Evidenz (2016); Politik der Evidenz. Öffentliche Bilder als Bilder der Öffentlichkeit im Trecento (2015); Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren. Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien (2001); Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien. Gestalt- und Funktionswandel des Tafelbildes im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (1992). In addition, various editorships and numerous articles about a broad field of topics. 

Web pages: www.bildevidenz.de; www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/khi/institut/mitarbeiter_innen/professoren/...

Freie Universität Berlin

Signa and Res-Pictoral Allegories in the Italian Renaissance (14th-16th century)

2004-2005

Klaus Krueger, Ph.D. (University of Munich 1987) is currently Professor of Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has been Research Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and Professor at the Universities of Greifswald and Basel. His main research interests are the history and cultural status of visual images, particularly their changing role in medieval and early modern times, with special reference to Italian painting and sculpture from the Duecento to the Seicento. He is author of Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien: Gestalt- und Funktionswandel des Tafelbildes im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert [The early cult of the image of St Francis in Italy: Formal and functional change in 13th and 14th century panel painting] (1992) and Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien (2001) [to be published in English translation by Zone Books as Unveiling the Invisible. Image and Aesthetic Illusion in Early Modern Italy]. Klaus has also published articles on the origin and early history of the altarpiece, on visionary images, on Caravaggio, and on aesthetic issues of film and contemporary art.

Polytechnic University of Milan (Italy) 

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Forms of crisis: architectural agency in times of climate collapse

2025–2026: Fall and Spring

Kevin Santus is an Italian architect, researcher, and educator. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano (2025), where he has served as Adjunct Professor and contributed to teaching and research activities in architecture and urban design. 

He is co-founder of the architecture collective OFFCOLL*. His research focuses on architecture as a cultural and operative agency within conditions of climate collapse, with particular attention to fragile, rural, and post-industrial territories. 

His work spans design research, pedagogy, editorial production, and curatorial practice, examining how architectural knowledge and practice can engage contemporary environmental and spatial crises.

University of Haifa

Ius commune, exploitation, and emancipation

2010-2011: Fall

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Kenneth Stow has devoted over forty years to studying the relations between the Church and the Jews in the Middle Ages and into early modern times. His studies are both diachronic and synchronic. He has written essays tracing developments in papal policies from the early Church through the eighteenth century, and he has concentrated on the history of the Jews in Rome in the early modern period, which is to say, the longtime theoretical developments applied in practice. In all his studies, he has emphasized the role of law, canon law and ius commune, in particular, in shaping first thinking and then action with respect to the Jews. He will spend his time as a Fellow at the Italian Academy studying the texts of these two legal traditions housed in the Columbia libraries, especially those in the Diamond Law Library, which is a unique collection.

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institute (Italy)

Between simplicity and magnificence: a friar in mercantile Florence

2024–2025: Spring

Katharine Stahlbuhk was trained as a conservator for wall paintings before her studies in art history. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2018 from Hamburg University, and she has held positions at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (2014–2018) and the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institut for Art History (2019–2021). She was a Rush H. Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2022–2023) and is currently a postdoc fellow at the University of Padua. Her first book, Oltre il colore. Die farbreduzierte Wandmalerei zwischen Humilitas und Observanzreformen, was published in 2021 with Deutscher Kunstverlag. She has written several articles and co-curated volumes such as La monocromia nella teoria e nella pratica pittorica dal Trecento al Seicento, published with Campisano in 2022. She is also co-editor of the first German translation and critical edition of Leon Battista Alberti’s Profugiorum ab aerumna (Über die Seelenruhe), which first appeared in 2022.

University of Ottawa

Augustine, the Fall of Rome and Christian world alienation in Hannah Arendt

2014-2015: Spring

I studied Classics and Italian literature in Basel, Berne and Bologna and received a doctorate in Classics from the University of Zurich. I am currently an associate professor of Classics at the University of Ottawa. My fields of interest include later ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy, intellectual history, and dance research. My project at the Italian Academy is part of ongoing research on the Christian transformation of the ancient concept of scholé / otium ('leisure') and on the modern reception of Augustine.
http://www.cla-srs.uottawa.ca/eng/faculty/schlapbach.html

Columbia University (U.S.A.)

Pathogenic role of tubulin tyrosine ligase and delta-2 tubulin in Alzheimer’s disease

2020-2021: Fall and Spring

Dr. Julie Parato is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Dr. Parato’s research focuses on changes in microtubule dynamics and tubulin post-translational modifications in Alzheimer's disease. Her work centers on how these alterations contribute to the hyperphosphorylation of tau, synaptic loss and neurodegeneration.

Dr. Parato received her PhD in Neural and Behavioral Sciences from the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at SUNY Downstate in New York. Prior to that, she received her MS in Molecular Biology from Long Island University. She has also served as a mentor for the New York Academy of Sciences and as an adjunct assistant professor for CUNY in Biology and Psychology.

University Paris Nanterre (France)

Against the grain: women artists and office technologies

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Judith Delfiner is Associate Professor in contemporary art history at Paris Nanterre University. She is currently on secondment to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS/CNRS). 

Her work focuses on counterculture practices (painting, literature, assemblage, music, film, installation, performance, fanzines, photography, xerography, mail art, and artist's books), a concept she examines in light of the experimental and underground art scenes in the United States after World War II, which allows her to question its historicity and relevance today. She has developed this research along different lines, including links to historical avant-garde movements, Dada in particular (Double-Barrelled Gun: Dada in the United States, 1945-1957, Les presses du reel, 2011) or the question of modes of production and circulation of alternative printing techniques (Jay DeFeo – Etudes Xérographiques, La Part de L’oeil, 2023). 

She is currently writing a book on the medium of photocopying under contract with Zone Books. Judith Delfiner was also editor-in-chief of Perspective: actualité en histoire de l'art, the journal of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), from 2017 to 2020. 

In 2024, she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will conduct research on the various strategies developed by women artists, from the 1960s to the present day, for reappropriating office technologies in order to use them against the grain and turn them into vectors of creation.

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).

University of Essex

Lineages of Contemporary Italian Culture

2002-2003

Jonathan White was raised in the U.S. and Australia. He was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Cambridge and has spent most of his professional career in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex in the U.K. Earlier publications were mainly on English and European Literature, including an edited book on Postcolonial Studies, and ongoing articles on topics such as the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. He is currently writing a sequel to his 2001 book, "Italy: the Enduring Culture," published by Continuum. Interests include music, especially opera, and aspects of urban, artistic, literary and socio-historical development in Italy.

Columbia University (U.S.A.)

Preservation in practice: U.S. Southern architecture for fire prevention

2020-2021: Fall

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Jonah Rowen is an architectural historian and educator whose work focuses on the intersections between architectural technics and construction, economics, environments, materials and commodities, and labor. He received his Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Planning and Preservation, with a Certificate from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. There, he wrote a dissertation on buildings' design and production, figured as technologies of risk management and security, in the setting of nineteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean colonialism and exchanges. His research for that project was based on documents from archives in the Caribbean and the U.K., including business records, architects' drawings and other forms of accounting, and their written correspondence with other building professionals, from engineers, fabricators, and builders to insurance agents. Close analysis of drawings constitutes an especially significant mode of evidentiary study in his scholarly work. He holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University, and has taught at Rice University, the Parsons School of Design, the Cooper Union School of Architecture, Columbia University and Barnard College, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Among his publications are essays in Grey Room, Log, and Pidgin, and he was a founding editor of Project: A Journal for Architecture.

Dartmouth College (USA)

Reshaping the arts of space

2025–⁠2026: Fall

John Kulvicki is a philosopher focusing on non-linguistic representation in art, science, and perception.

Across a few books and many papers, he has explored topics such as the nature of depiction, pictorial realism, sounds, colors, maps, iconography, pictorial metaphor, the primary/secondary quality distinction, the structure of perceptual representations, the analog/digital distinction, the uses of images in science, and the relationship between the philosophy of language and non-linguistic forms of representation.

His current project, Reshaping the Arts of Space, rethinks how we categorize art forms. Centering on how the arts engage with space enfranchises many practices that have received relatively little attention from philosophers, because they are not central to the fine arts. Diorama, cut silhouette, and tchotchkes have much to tell us about more artistically central practices like picture-making, statuary, and installation.

He has been a fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies, a Visiting Director of Studies at EHESS, Paris, and is currently Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. 

More information: kulvicki.org

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...

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Pictorial presence as a function of conflicting information-processing in two visual subsystems

2012-2013: Spring

Barnard College (USA)

Senior Fellow

A new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses

2023–2024: Fall

Jhumpa Lahiri is a bilingual writer, translator, and literary critic born in London and raised in the United States.

She has just joined the Academy as a Senior Fellow and, for this semester, she is also resident in the Academy building as part of the Fall 2023 cohort of Fellows.

She is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Barnard (the college where she got her B.A. in English). Prof. Lahiri earned her graduate degrees at Boston University: an M.A. in English Literature, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. 

In English, she is the author of two short-story collections (Interpreter of Maladies; Unaccustomed Earth) and two novels (The Namesake; The Lowland) all of which explore the experiences of Bengali immigrants in the United States. In Italian, she has written two works of non-fiction: In altre parole (translated into English by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words, and Il vestito dei libri (translated as The Clothing of Books by Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. In Italian, she has also published the novel Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), and a volume of poetry entitled Il quaderno di Nerina (forthcoming in English as Nerina’s notebook). She has translated three novels by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone, and is the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. A contributor for over twenty-five years to The New Yorker magazine, she has published critical essays on authors including Ovid, Dante, Primo Levi, Alessandro Manzoni, and James Joyce. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was an analysis of the Italian palazzo as setting and metaphor in English Jacobean drama.

Her teaching interests include the theory and practice of literary translation, the Italian short story, exophonic writers, Classical reception and adaptation, and the diary as literary craft and form. At Princeton University, she taught in the Humanities Sequence (“Approaches to Western Culture: from Antiquity to the Middle Ages”) and founded the university’s first interdisciplinary course on the Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington. She served as Director of Princeton’s Creative Writing Program for three years and helped to inaugurate Princeton’s Translator-in-Residence program position. Her recognitions include the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is a Board member of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a permanent juror for the Strega Prize in Italy, and is part of the editorial committee of the historic Italian literary journal Nuovi Argomenti. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012, and was on the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 2014. In 2016, she received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Lahiri holds a B.A. in English from Barnard College. She earned her graduate degrees at Boston University: an M.A. in English Literature, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has received honorary degrees from The University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, and the University of Rhode Island, and in Italy, from the University of Siena per Stranieri and from the University of Bologna.

Her most recent English-language publication is a volume of essays, Translating Myself and Others. Her third book of short stories, Racconti romani, was published in Italy in September 2022, and appears in the English language in 2023 as Roman Stories, translated by the author in collaboration with Todd Portnowitz. She is currently co-translating, with Professor Yelena Baraz at Princeton University, Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Latin to English for The Modern Library.

*photo by Elena Seibert

Queen Mary University of London (UK)

Decolonising discovery: exploration, discovery and cultural exchange in the Italian Renaissance

2024–2025: Spring

Jerry Brotton is a writer, broadcaster and curator. He is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, having been educated at the universities of Sussex, Essex and London. He is a prize-winning and bestselling author of ten books published in more than twenty languages. They include Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (2000, with Lisa Jardine), The Renaissance Bazaar: from the Silk Road to Michelangelo (2002), The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection (2006), shortlisted for the Samuel Jonson Prize, and the prize-winning New York Times bestseller, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012). He has presented many acclaimed BBC television and radio series including Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession (BBC4), Blood and Bronze on Benvenuto Cellini (BBC Radio 3), One Direction (BBC Radio 4) and We Other Tudors (BBC Radio 3). He has also curated exhibitions, including Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images (Venice Biennale, 2011), and Talking Maps (Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2019-2020). His book This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (Penguin, 2016) was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Waterstone’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and winner of the Historical Writer’s Association Prize for Non-Fiction. His latest book is Four Points of the Compass: the Unexpected History of Direction (Penguin and Grove Atlantic, 2024).

Website: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sed/staff/brottonj.html

European University Institute

The transmission of Italian financial culture in France in the 15th and 16th centuries

2008-2009: Fall

Jérémie Barthas took his Ph.D. at the European University Institute ( Florence ) in 2006, with a dissertation on Machiavelli’s concept of people in arms and the Florentine public debt. He was associate researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) from 2005 to 2007, and Florence Gould Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa i Tatti, Florence) in 2007-2008.

His research fields include: the modern history of Italy and France (15th-18th centuries); the history of political thought; the history of financial culture, particularly in Italy ; the origins of political economy; and the social and financial history of the republic of the Great Council (1494-1512).

Recently, he edited and contributed to Della tirannia; Machiavelli con Bartolo, (Firenze: Olschki, 2007) and published Machiavelli e i libertini fiorentini; col ‘Sermone sopra l'elezione del Gonfaloniere’ del libertino Pier Filippo Pandolfini (1528), in Rivista Storica Italiana, 2 2008. He wrote an essay, Machiavelli in political thought from the age of revolutions to the present, to be published in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, edited by J. Najemy.

While at the Italian Academy he will complete the manuscript of his book on Machiavelli’s argument that “money is not the sinew of war.” He will also proceed with new research aiming to investigate what Antoine de Montchrestien means when, in his Traité de l’œconomie politique (1615), he invites the reader to consider Italian history in order to understand the danger represented by “the artifices and inventions of the gens de finances.”

Maryland Institute College of Art

Mediterranean modernity: art and nationalism in Italy and Greece, 1918-1945

2006-2007

Jennie Hirsh received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she wrote a dissertation on pictorial and literary self-representation in the oeuvre of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. She also holds an MA in Italian from Middlebury College (1998), an MA in Italian Renaissance Art from Bryn Mawr (1997), and a BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1993).
While at the Italian Academy, she will continue to work on her project on "Mediterranean Modernity: Art and Nationalism in Italy and Greece, 1918-1945," which compares six artists working under authoritarian regimes during and after the interwar period. In particular, this project examines how classical, Etruscan, and Byzantine strategies function with the rhetoric of pictorial modernism in these two countries. She will also be completing work on a monograph on Giorgio de Chirico, a project that grows out of her doctoral dissertation. Her research and teaching interests include the classical tradition, fascist architecture, postwar Italian cinema, visual culture and the Holocaust, relationships between word and image, and self-portraiture. Her publications include essays on Giorgio de Chirico, Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini, Gianni Amelio, and contemporary photographer Pipo Nguyen-Duy.
Prior to arriving at the Italian Academy, she was Hannah Seeger Davis postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, where she began work on her project on "Mediterranean Modernity." From 2003 until 2005, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture at Oberlin College. Prior to that appointment, she taught courses on modern and contemporary art, the history of Western Art, Italian Renaissance art and architecture, postwar Italian cinema, and Italian language at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, Moore College of Art & Design, and Temple University between 1997 and 2003. Hirsh will be joining the faculty in the Department of Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art in January 2007.

Università degli Studi di Udine

Italian mosaic and terrazzo workers in New York: the transplantation of an aesthetic and artisanal heritage.

2007-2008

Javier P. Grossutti was born in Argentina in 1967 and graduated in Political Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires in 1991. Also in 1991, he "returned" to Friuli and attended a specialization course at the Degree course in International and Diplomatic Sciences at the University of Trieste in Gorizia. He received his Doctorate in Political Geography from the University of Trieste (1994-1996). His research thesis, "I 'rientri' in Friuli da Argentina, Brasile, Uruguay e Venezuela (1989-1991)", was published in 1997. His main field of study includes: Friulian emigration, return migration and problems connected to Friulian and Italian communities abroad, where he has conducted numerous surveys for the Universities of Trieste, Trento and Udine. He has carried out research in collaboration with the Universities of Caen (France), Buenos Aires, Quilmes, Cuyo-Mendoza and Patagonia (Argentina) and Itaja" (Brazil). He participated in the projects "Regional Development and Cultural Landscape Change: the Example of the Alps - Evaluating and Adjusting EU and National Policies to Manage a Balanced Change" and "Future in the Alps", collaborating with universities and research centers in Austria, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Slovenia. He has held courses on Italian emigration and return migration for the University of Udine. Currently he is contracted researcher at the University of Udine, Faculty of Economics, and contracted professor at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, also at the University of Udine. His main publications include: Una forma particolare di immigrazione: i 'rientri' in Trentino dall"America Latina 1989-1994 (Milan 1997); Una scelta difficile. Egidio Feruglio in Argentina (Udine 1997); L"emigrazione dal Friuli. Saggio bibliografico (Pordenone 1997); Les coopératives de travail des maçons frioulans en France (Caen 2001); Friulani d"Argentina: l"altra patria oltreoceano 1875-1914 (Roma 2004);Vivir en dos lugares al mismo tiempo. Los enfermeros de Pantianicco (Friuli) en Buenos Aires (siglos XIX-XX) (Buenos Aires 2005); Flussi migratori di rientro e trasformazione dell"economia friulana tra shock petrolifero, terremoto e apertura dell"Est Europeo (San Marino 2007). He was also the scientific editor of the section "Emigration and work" of the Provincial Museum of Country Life "Diogene Penzi".

Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)

Fiendish attacks: the devil as iconoclast and victim of defacing

2023–2024: Spring

Jasmin Mersmann is a professor of Early Modern Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, with a focus on Italian art and art theory. Previously she taught at the University of Arts in Linz (Austria) and at Humboldt University Berlin. She was head of the research project "unBinding Bodies" and a research fellow at the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, at the IKKM in Weimar and at the IFK in Vienna. In 2012, she completed her PhD on Lodovico Cigoli and conflicting concepts of truth in early modern times (Lodovico Cigoli. Formen der Wahrheit um 1600, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016). She studied art history, philosophy, and history in Freiburg, Paris, and Berlin, and holds MA degrees from Humboldt University and the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Her research focuses on the intersection of art history and cultural history. Currently, she is finishing a book on early modern demonology and the motif of the devil’s pact. At the Academy, she will be working on iconoclastic attacks alleged to have been inspired by demons.

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.

Independent Scholar (Germany)

Paul Oskar Kristeller’s letters from Italy (1934–39)

2022-2023: Fall

Jan Eike Dunkhase is an intellectual and cultural historian based in Berlin with a focus on the history of historiography and the philosophy of history. After receiving his MA in History, Philosophy, and Jewish Studies from Heidelberg University, and his PhD in Modern History from Freie Universität Berlin, he worked as a Research Associate at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University, at the German Literature Archive Marbach, and at Bielefeld University. In 2019 he was a Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center (NYC).

He is the author of several monographs, among them Spinoza der Hebräer: Zu einer israelischen Erinnerungsfigur (2013), Absurde Geschichte: Reinhart Kosellecks historischer Existentialismus (2015), and Provinz der Moderne: Marbachs Weg zum Deutschen Literaturarchiv (2021), as well as the editor of Reinhart Koselleck’s correspondence with Carl Schmitt (2019).

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.

Columbia University (USA) 

Using polyamine dependency to target the cancer epigenome 

2026–2027: 12 months

Originally from Italy, Ivano graduated in genetics and molecular biology at Sapienza University in Rome, where he worked to elucidate the role of epigenetics in mediating DNA damage repair in breast cancer. He then conducted doctoral studies at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, under the supervision of Prof. Luciano Di Croce, unveiling key organization principles of the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) as well as its role in the anteroposterior skeletal patterning of mice. After his PhD, he moved to Massachusetts to join the Lab of Prof. Oliver J. Rando, studying the inheritance of acquired traits in mice, with a focus on the packaging of the paternal genetic material into sperm. He joined the lab of Prof. Schvartzman in 2026 to work on the role of polyamines in cell proliferation and differentiation.

University of Minnesota

Remapping natural history in early modern Italy: Antonio Vallisneri's scientific network

2012-2013

Ivano Dal Prete obtained his Ph.D. in 2005 in the History of European Society (University of Verona). In 2005-2008 he was awarded research fellowships by the Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thinking (CNR-ISPF, Milan), by the University of Eastern Piedmont, and by the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Antonio Vallisneri (Milan). In 2008-2010 he lectured at Yale University in the History of Science and Medicine Program; in 2011-2012 he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis campus), where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the History of Science and Technology program.
Ivano Dal Prete was a visiting student at Northwestern University (2001), attended courses in the history and philosophy of science at the Centre Koyre, Paris (2001, with a scholarship from the University of Verona), and was a fellow of the Acadámie Française de Rome. In his research work, he has collaborated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) "Shadyc," Marseille, with the University of Montpellier, with the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques (CHRST, Paris) and with Stanford University.
His research interests lie in the scientific culture of early modern Europe, with a focus on the Republic of Venice. He is particularly attracted by the interplay of science and art, religion and politics and by the exciting opportunities this field opens to interdisciplinary work. Rather than analyzing scientific controversies among leading intellectuals, he studies practitioners, amateurs, provincial academies and other "minor" actors that made up the social context of early modern science, and participated in its construction.
In 2008 he published the book Scienza e Societa' nel Settecento Veneto, a case study of the interrelations between science and society in the 18th-century Venetian provinces. In line with this approach, Ivano Dal Prete's book explores the physical and social spaces where debates on medicine, electricity, the human generation and the history of the Earth took place, and stresses the relevance of provincial and non-institutional contexts to a broader understanding of Enlightenment culture. More recently, he has studied the debate on the age and history of the Earth in Renaissance Venice, questioning the traditional assumption that the Biblical chronology was rarely challenged before the 18th century. At the Italian Academy, he will study the correspondence of Antonio Vallisneri (physician and naturalist, 1661-1730) to shed light on Italian local scientific networks and on their role in the shaping of early modern natural history.

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Giuseppe de Ribera and the dissimulation of sight

2011-2012: Fall

Dr. Itay Sapir was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1973. He holds an MA in History from Tel Aviv University, and, since 2008, a PhD in Art History and Aesthetics from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA, University of Amsterdam) and the École des hautes Études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Ténèbres sans leçons: the Aesthetics and Epistemology of Roman Tenebrist Painting, 1595-1610"; it will soon be published (in French) by Peter Lang in the "Science, Nature and the Arts" series. Dr. Sapir has published numerous articles on artists such as Caravaggio and Adam Elsheimer.
Sapir was a doctoral fellow at ASCA, where he taught several Art History and Cultural Analysis courses; he later taught courses at the Liberal Studies Program of NYU in France, and at the History and Art History departments of Tel Aviv University. Since 2009, Sapir is a post-doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, working on a research project about the Port Scenes of Claude Lorrain.

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).

Universität Hamburg

Memory and image archiving: the logic of visual memory in Aby Warburg

2013-2014: Spring

Isabella Woldt is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the History of Art at Universität Hamburg. Her studies focus on the epistemology of visual elements, particularly in the works of Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer. She examines the psychological, anthropological, and philosophical foundations of Warburg's theory of visual memory, expressed and presented in his picture series. At the same time, she investigates connections between the humanities and the natural sciences, especially concerning the process of remembering, in light of recent findings on the function of image memory in empirical studies. 

She is co-editor of the collected works of Aby Warburg and has collaboratively published his "Picture Series and Exhibitions" in 2012. She is editing the documentation of Warburg's journey to the U.S (1895-1896), his 1923 Kreuzlingen-Lecture, and his photographic and ethnographic collections. Another main research area is also Baroque art and architecture in Central and East-Central Europe, aristocratic estates, residential cities, and the unique culture of Sarmatism. She received the Aby Warburg Prize (Warburg-Stipend) from the Hamburg Senate in 2008, and a research fellowship at the German Forum for Art History in Paris in 2012. At the Academy she will intensify her research on Warburg and Cassirer and extend it to an investigation of logic in the process of visual creativity and memory.

Sveučilište u Rijeci (Croatia)

The speech rhythm of Italian Americans

2024–2025: Spring

Isabella Matticchio is an Italo-Croatian linguist working on the Italian language spoken outside of Italy, and on other Romance varieties – Istrovenetian and Istriot – spoken in Croatia by the Italian National Community.

Recently she served as a consultant in securing the registration of the Istriot language as an intangible cultural heritage of the Republic of Croatia, in the European Union.

Isabella received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Padua in 2017, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Rijeka, Croatia, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Italian language and linguistics.

Before accepting her teaching and research position in Rijeka, she held teaching and research appointments at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and at the University of Pula, Croatia (where she also completed her BA and MA in Italian language and literature).

Following her research interest in the Italian language, culture, and heritage, Isabella will work on the speech rhythm of Italian Americans during her stay at the Italian Academy.

Columbia University

Associate Fellow

From necropolis to metropolis: the rediscovery of the catacombs in Counter Reformation Rome

2007-2008

Irina Oryshkevich received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 2003. Since completing her dissertation--a study of the history of the Roman catacombs from late antiquity to the early modern period--she has been a fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University and a recipient of a grant from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
Since her dissertation, Dr. Oryshkevich has focused on the cult of martyrs and the historiography of the early Church in the Counter Reformation, and their impact on the nascent discipline of 'Christian archaeology'. She will devote her residency at the Italian Academy to what is in effect a sequel to her dissertation, namely, the transformation of the catacombs, which had been viewed throughout the middle ages as mere cemeteries, into 'Roma sotterranea', a clandestine city that sheltered thousands of Christians from imperial persecutions. This transformation, assisted through imagery and rhetoric, provided Christian Rome with physical foundations, thereby reconfirming its primacy at a time when the papacy was under fierce attack on every confessional front.

Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (Italy)

Remote sensing for forest and land monitoring: added value in environmental and policy impacts in the climate change crisis

2023–2024: Spring

Inge Jonckheere is a Belgian Environmental Engineer who obtained a PhD in Applied Bioscience Engineering in 2005 at the KULeuven (Belgium). She worked at the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy) and was Guest Lecturer in the Geomatics Group at the KULeuven, combined with a mandate as Science Programme Manager for Environment at the European Science Foundation, Strasbourg (France). Since 2010, she has been working as Thematic Lead of Remote Sensing in the Forestry Department, supporting developing countries to set up national monitoring systems using satellite data. She is an official reviewer at the UN Framework of Climate Change and is Lead Author in the International Panel of Climate Change including the Sixth Assessment Report published in 2022. She is co-editor of scientific books and high impact journals and has (co-) authored more than one hundred scientific and mainstream articles. Her main current interest is the use of earth observation for a sustainable environment.

Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Italy) 

Constituent ecologies: social reproduction after the nonhuman turn 

2026–2027: Spring

Ilaria Santoemma is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Dirpolis Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa), and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna and Roma Tre University. Her doctoral dissertation, “A Cartography of the Posthumanities: From Epistemology to Political Philosophy” (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 2022), won the Paola Bora Prize for the best thesis in Gender and Feminist Studies for the year 2023. Her research sits at the intersection of political philosophy, political epistemology, critical posthumanism, new materialism, political ecology and philosophy of technology. Recent publications include work on non-human agency, Social Reproduction Theory’s ecofeminist turn, and political technology. 

Website: www.santannapisa.it/en/ilaria-santoemma

Università di Bologna

Partitioned countries, museums, and communities: Istria 1884–2014

2014-2015: Fall

Ilaria Porciani is professor of Modern and Contemporary History and the History of the Historiography at the Department of History, Cultures and Civilization of the University of Bologna.
She has published widely on the history of the historiography, on nationalism, on the history of the university and of education, often with a gender approach.
Her book La festa della nazione. Rappresentazione dello stato e spazi sociali nell'Italia unita(1996 – 2nd edition 1997) was awarded the Acqui storia prize for modern history.
She is a member of the board of the Journal of Modern European History; Passato e Presente; Nazioni e Regioni.
Among her publications: Atlas of European Historiography. The Making of a Profession 1800 – 2005. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2010 (co-edited with Lutz Rapahel), pp.264.
Setting the Standards. Institutions, networks and Communities in European Historiography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012 (co-edited with Jo Tollebeek), pp.456.
She is interested in public history, history museums, and in the political use of food.
She is presently working on Partitions, museums, and communities. Istria 1884-2014.
http://www.unibo.it/SitoWebDocente/default.aspx?UPN=ilaria.porciani%40un...

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Jewish persecution and looted art in Italy: evidence and denial, 1938–2015

2016-2017: Spring

Ilaria Pavan is Assistant Professor in Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Her main research interest is the history of Italian Jews and Italian antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on the Fascist and post–Fascist period. She published several books on these topics such as "Il podestà ebreo. La storia di Renzo Ravenna tra fascismo e leggi razziali" (Laterza 2006) and, with M. Al Kalak, "Un’altra fede. Le case dei catecumeni in area estense. 1583–1938" (Olschki 2013). She is the editor in chief of the journal "Contemporanea. XIX and XX Century History Review." She is currently working on a book exploring the relations between the development of forms of transitional justice and the politics of Jewish retributions in the post-Shoah era.

Web page: http://homepage.sns.it/pavan/

University College Roosevelt - Middelburg

Oratorio, oratory, and the early modern Italian soundscape

2013-2014

Huub van der Linden is a cultural historian. He holds MA degrees in musicology from the University of Utrecht and in Early Modern Cultural and Intellectual History from the Warburg Institute in London (the latter with distinction). In September 2012 he received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence for his dissertation on the circulation and performance of Italian oratorio around 1700. He is currently attached to University College Roosevelt in Middelburg (The Netherlands). Besides his work on Italian musical culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Van der Linden also has an interest in the history of the book and of reading, as well as in the processes of creating, copying, transporting, and otherwise physically handling paintings in early modern Europe. He has published a number of articles dealing with various aspects of all of these topics. Most recently he has started to explore early modern European perceptions and accounts of the sonic world of Safavid Persia (1501-1736). At the Italian Academy he will work on a project that developed out of his doctoral dissertation, and which deals with the cultural politics of voice in Italy, specifically in relation to a series of oratorio performances in private palace in Bologna in the years around 1700. So far Van der Linden's work has been supported by received numerous study and research grants, among others an eight-month scholarship from the Collegio dei Fiamminghi in Bologna for work on his first MA thesis, fellowships from the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence and the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (Hugenholtz Stipend, awarded for an outstanding MA dissertation), a dissertation research fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin, an Ernst Mach Grant from the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education & Research, and a fellowship from the Fondazione Ermitage Italia at Ferrara. Most recently he has worked in Germany thanks to fellowships from the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha and the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin.

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

University of Vienna

Measuring aesthetic effects: new paradigms to bridge empirical aesthetics and art history

2018-2019: Fall

Helmut Leder is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychological Basic Research at the University of Vienna, since 2004. He is Head of the Research Focus “Perceptual Aesthetics“ and the EVA-lab, Head of the interdisciplinary Cognitive Sciences Research Platform. His main fields of research are aesthetics, psychology of the arts, design – and face perception. His holds a PhD from the University of Fribourg. He was a visiting Researcher at the University of Stirling, ATR Japan, USC and UCSD, at the Languages of Emotion-Cluster, FU Berlin and Queens College, CUNY, he was a founding member of GIAS at NYU. He is the author or co-author of many scholarly publications. For his research in empirical aesthetics he was awarded the Berlyne Award for career contributions to the psychology of aesthetics of the American Psychological Association, and the Baumgarten Award of IAEA in 2002. His research was sponsored by several grants in the field of empirical aesthetics, face processing and with industrial partners. Since 2014 he is the president of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA).

Web page: https://ppcms.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=2559

Photo by: Alexandru Munteanu

Columbia University

Heritage Wars: The Erasure of History in Iraq and Syria

2016-2017: Fall

Co-sponsored by the “Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments” project (Columbia University)

Helen Malko is a Research Associate at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She received a PhD in archaeology and anthropology from Stony Brook University, and a Master’s degree in archaeology of the Ancient Near East from Baghdad University. She holds a diploma in Historic Preservation from Rutgers University. Her current research is focused on the ongoing deliberate destruction of monuments and historical landscapes in Iraq and Syria, and the related changes in the rhetoric of heritage studies and archaeological ethics that have accompanied this destruction. In particular, she is analyzing the renewed ideologies of preservation and rescue that have revived paradigms of the nineteenth century archaeology. Other areas of her research and scholarly interest include the understanding of cultural interaction in antiquity, ideas of historical consciousness, and antiquarianism in Mesopotamia. Helen has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Turkey and Iraq, and is currently the content manager for the website of the Columbia project “Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments".

Web page: https://columbia.academia.edu/HelenMalk

Friedrich-Alexander Universität

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, astrology and cultural memory: translating the disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem

2014-2015: Fall

H. Darrel Rutkin is a Historian of Science specializing in the history of medieval, Renaissance and early modern astrology with a PhD from Indiana University. Recipient of prestigious pre- and post-doctoral fellowships—including a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at M.I.T. and in its current incarnation at the Huntington Library, NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and most recently at the Internationales Kolleg for Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung (IKGF) at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Nürnberg-Erlangen —I am hoping to land a permanent academic appointment soon! I have also contributed to the Cambridge History of Science and the Harvard Companion to the Classical Tradition. At the Italian Academy, I will work on my translation (the first into English) of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputations against Divinatory Astrology for the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
https://uni-erlangen.academia.edu/HDarrelRutkin

Yale University

Faire un tamtam: timbre, noise, and emotions in 19th-century music

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Gundula Kreuzer is Associate Professor of Music at Yale University. Her publications and research interests embrace the history and theory of opera (particularly of the “long” nineteenth century), with a special focus on aspects of performance, staging, technology, mediality, and sound; reception history and music historiography; music and politics; music in the Third Reich; German and European cultural history since the late eighteenth century; Verdi and Wagner.
Kreuzer is currently finishing a book called Wagnerian Technologies for the University of California Press, in which she argues that composers since the late eighteenth century increasingly integrated specific stage technologies into their scores to enhance opera’s desired multimedia effects. Her first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), won several awards. Kreuzer also edited Verdi’s instrumental chamber music (The University of Chicago Press and Ricordi, 2010); co-edited a special issue, “Opera in Transition” of The Opera Quarterly (2011); and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Wagnerspectrum.

Web page: http://yalemusic.yale.edu/people/gundula-kreuzer

Columbia University

Detecting auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia with multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI

2012-2013

Guillermo Horga received his M.D. from the Miguel Hernandez University of Spain in 2004. He completed his clinical specialization in Psychiatry at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, Spain, where he started his studies on the brain mechanisms underlying schizophrenia. His dissertation work explores brain metabolism during the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations, the perception of voices in the absence of corresponding stimuli, in patients with acute psychotic symptoms.
After his residency, he came to Dr. Brad Peterson's brain imaging laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (Columbia University Medical Center) under the auspices of a fellowship from the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation, where he applied functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) to the study of the neural mechanisms of learning and cognition in health as well as their disruption in a number of mental disorders in youth and adulthood (including obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depression and schizophrenia).
His current work aims to combine fMRI techniques and computational modeling to better understand the mechanisms that generate psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia. This work promises to afford detailed insight into the mechanisms underlying psychosis with the ultimate goal of uncovering novel treatment targets for patients who do not benefit from standard treatments.

University of California

Santa Barbara; Universita' degli Studi

The Influence of Italian Music on the Emergence of a Modern Audience in France in the Eighteenth Century

2004-2005

Guido Olivieri has published articles and reviews on Baroque instrumental music and on the music of Gaetano Donizetti and Luciano Berio in scholarly journals. He also contributed to the new editions of the two major dictionaries in the field: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. His research traces the influence of social and political contexts on the circulation of music and musicians in eighteenth-century Europe. Using new sources, he has investigated the history of musical institutions in Naples, aspects of the aesthetics of reception and musical patronage, shedding light on the activity of several musicians and rediscovering unedited compositions. His research at the Italian Academy will focus on the reception of Italian music in France and the emergence of a modern audience at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Università di Siena

The rise of the novel and the rise of human sciences: a parallel history

2018-2019: Fall

Guido Mazzoni is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Siena. He earned his PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He has been visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, the University of Chicago, the Scuola Normale Superiore, and the University of California Berkeley. He has also been Italian Affilated Fellow for the Arts at the American Academy, Rome, and professor of creative writing at the Scuola Molly Bloom, Rome, and at IULM, Milan.

As a poet, he is the author of La scomparsa del respiro dopo la caduta (in Poesia contemporanea. Terzo quaderno italiano, Guerini, 1992), I mondi (Donzelli, 2010), and La pura superficie (Donzelli, 2017). His work as a scholar focuses on literary genres as symbolic forms. He has written a book on modern poetry (Sulla poesia moderna, Il Mulino 2005) and a Theory of the Novel (Harvard University Press 2017: Italian version Teoria del romanzo, Il Mulino 2011). He has also written a book on contemporary politics and society, drawing on literature and the social sciences (I destini generali, Laterza 2015). He is one of the founders and editors of the cultural website Le parole e le cose.

Web page: https://www.dfclam.unisi.it/it/dipartimento/persone/docenti/mazzoni-guido

Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio

Palladio and War

2009-2010: Fall and Spring

Kress Foundation Italian Academy Fellow

Director of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Ferrara (1994 -2002), and the University of Milan (2005). In 2008, he was Craig Hugh Smyth Visiting Fellow at Villa I Tatti, Florence. His broad interests center on Renaissance architectural history, with a particular emphasis on Venetian architecture and on the culture of the Antique in the Renaissance. Among his publications are: Palladio Privato (Venice 2008 and Berlin 2009); PALLADIO (exhibition catalogue, edited with Howard Burns; London 2009); Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548-1616 (exhibition catalogue, edited with Franco Barbieri; Venice 2003).

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Paris

The Sense of Others: Towards an Epistemology of Trust

2004-2005

Gloria Origgi (Ph.D, University of Milan) is now a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She has worked in Paris for Ecole Polytechnique and taught at the University of Bologna for six years. Her research interests are in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and, more recently, in social epistemology and Web studies. She is the author of the book Introduzione a Quine (Laterza, 2000) and has edited the volume Text-e (Editions Bpi, Paris, and Macmillan Palgrave, London). She has also written numerous articles (some of them available on line at http://gloriaoriggi.free.fr/) and collaborates regularly to the cultural supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore. She is the editor of the interdisciplines.org project, a website for virtual conferences in social and cognitive science. While at the Italian Academy, Gloria will work on a project entitled The Sense of Others: Towards an Epistemology of Trust.

Institut Nicod (CNRS–ENS–EHESS)

Living through the eyes and the words of others: a social epistemology of reputation

2013-2014: Fall

2004-2005: Fall and Spring

Gloria Origgi's work focuses on issues of social epistemology, philosophy of social science and philosophy of new technologies. She is particularly interested in the relation between knowledge and society. Her latest books are on trust (VRIN 2008) and reputation (Seuil 2013) and she's writing a new book on the epistemology of reputation and the massive use of rankings in democratic societies. She has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on trust, democracy and the Internet, trust and knowledge, the relation between truth and democracy and the role of ranking systems in the Internet-based knowledge society. She conceives social epistemology as a form of critical theory of the society of knowledge. She is also a writer (La Figlia della Gallina Nera, 2008) and a journalist and commentator for various Italian newspapers and magazines (Micromega, Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Fatto). She is member of the European Commission Board "Horizons 2020" whose aim is to design European research policies for the next 6 years.

Università di Camerino (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Follow the building! Architecture and the production of material worth

2024–2025: Fall

A full professor at the Scuola di Architettura e Design, Università degli Studi di Camerino (SAAD UNICAM), Giuseppe Ciorra is a critic, writer, and director of the International Ph.D. program “Villard d’Honnecourt” at IUAV University in Venice. An author of books and essays, he has published monographic studies on Ludovico Quaroni, Peter Eisenman, contemporary architecture, and urbanism. In 2011 he published Senza Architettura. Le ragioni di una crisi, a critical essay on the condition of architecture in Italy. Other subjects of his research are museums, exhibiting culture, and relations between architecture, politics and art. He is a member of CICA (the International Committee of Architectural Critics), an advisor for the EU Mies van der Rohe award for architecture (as well as a member of the 2024 jury), and co-director of the Italian Architecture Prize of MAXXI – Triennale Milano.

He was part of the curatorial team for the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 1991 and a juror for the 2016 edition. He has curated exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Since 2009, he has been the Senior Curator of MAXXI Architettura in Rome, where he curated—among other shows—“Re-cycle, Energy, Food,” “The Japanese House,” and “Bruno Zevi.” More recently he curated “Good News. Women in Architecture” (2020) and “Technoscape. The architecture of Engineering” (2022). From 2011 to 2021, he curated the Italian section of the Young Architects Program (YAP) founded by MoMA and MoMA PS1 (now MAXXI’s program called NXT). He is also the founder and co-curator of “Demanio Marittimo KM 278,” a yearly festival (in Senigallia, Italy) dedicated to culture and the arts, and the co-founder of “Future Architecture Platform” (now LINA), a European program for young practitioners and thinkers. From 2017 to 2018, he co-directed the interdisciplinary research program “Housing the Human,” based in Berlin.

His main research interests now (to be developed thanks to the fellowship at the Italian Academy) head in two directions: the current relationships between art and architecture theory and political/economic phenomena, and the impact of the political and technological context on design and representation tools.

Website: https://docenti.unicam.it/pdett.aspx?UteId=332&tv=d&ru=

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].

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; USA) 

Unveiling black hole scattering: analytic and causal structures in gravitational EFTs 

2026–2027: 12 months

Giulia Isabella is a theoretical physicist working at the interface of particle physics and gravity. Before joining the Italian Academy, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Université Paris-Saclay and previously completed a joint master’s degree in high-energy physics at ETH Zurich and École Polytechnique. 

A central aspect of her work is the use of general principles, such as causality and consistency, to constrain physical theories. She is particularly interested in applying these ideas to gravitational waves and black hole physics. Her recent work has uncovered new mathematical aspects of how gravity behaves in scattering processes and has led to high-precision results in determining black hole Love numbers, which describe how black holes respond to external perturbations.

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.

Collegio Carlo Alberto - Turin

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Global Development and Finance

Does fertility influence migration and the re-allocation of labor?

2010-2011: Fall

Giovanni Mastrobuoni obtained a PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2006. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Collegio Carlo Alberto and a research fellow at CeRP and at Netspar (in the Netherlands). His research focuses on labor economics and on the economics of crime. He has published in international journals and has received several research grants and several awards including the 2009 Carlo Giannini Prize for the best paper presented at the Italian Congress of Econometrics and Empirical Economics, the 2008 Steven H. Sandell Grant Award from Boston College, the 2007 Honorable Mention Dissertation Award from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and the 2007 National Academy of Social Insurance's Heinz Dissertation Award. He also serves as the vice-director of the Master in Economics at the Collegio Carlo Alberto.

Università di Bologna

Civic Pedagogies, Cultural Identity and the Issue of Liberal Education in Italy

2003-2004

Giovanni Giorgini is an Associate Professor of the History of Political Thought in the Philosophy Department of the University of Bologna. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, where he was Visiting Fellow in 1999. He received his degree in Philosophy at the University of Bologna and his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Turin. His research interests include ancient political thought (Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Sophists) and the revival of classical political thought by contemporary writers such as Stuart Hampshire, Martha Nussbaum, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair MacIntyre. He is the author of three books: La città e il tiranno (1993), an investigation of ancient Greek tyranny in the conceptual history tradition, Liberalismi eretici (1999), a critical examination of some contemporary liberal authors, and I doni di Pandora (2002), a study of ancient Greek political thought from the origins to 4th century B.C., which tries to combine the approaches of political theory, ancient history and the history of ideas.
At the Italian Academy, Professor Giorgini will work on the reform of curricula in contemporary Italy in the face of multiculturalism, using an approach deriving from the neo-Aristotelian focus on a common human nature and the importance of liberal education.

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (France), Instituto di Architectura di Venezia, IUAV

The painter as butcher: vivo and carne in early modern Italian painting

2024–2025: Spring

Giovanni Careri is Directeur d’études at the EHESS (the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris and Professor of Art History at IUAV University in Venice. His research focuses on singularly complex objects involving theoretical, anthropological and semiotic approaches: the “montage” of the arts in Bernini's Baroque chapels (Bernini, Flights of Love. The Art of Devotion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); the place of the beholder in Caravaggio’s painting (Caravaggio. La fabbrica dello spettatore, Milan, Jaca Book, 2017); the representation of the affetti in the network of paintings, plays, and ballets related to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (The Making of the Affetti. Tasso’s Jerusalem delivered from Carracci to Tiepolo, Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2022); and the construction of Christian history and the representation of alterity in the Sistine Chapel (Christians and Jews in the Sistine Chapel, Brepols, forthcoming in 2024). He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, the Wissenschaftskolleg Bildevidenz in Berlin, and the Académie de France – Villa Medici in Rome. During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will explore the concept of the “living” (il vivo) as related to the concept of the “true” (il vero), focusing on a corpus of genre paintings by the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci (1560–1609).

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

Universita' di Trento

Mental Representations of Strategic Interaction

2004-2005

Giovanna Devetag received a B.A. in Business Economics from Ca' Foscari University of Venice (1996), a Ph.D. in Economics from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa (2000), and a Post-doc Research Fellowship from the University of Trento (2000-2002). She is currently Ricercatrice in Business Economics and Management at the University of Trento. She has been a visiting student at UC Berkeley (1995) and visiting research fellow at Princeton University (1997). Her main research interests include experimental economics, behavioral game theory, and agent-based modelling. She has published articles in international journals including Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology, Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, Industrial and Corporate Change, Physica A. At the Italian Academy, Giovanna will work on the impact of visual and diagrammatic reasoning in the mental representation of strategic interaction.

Università degli Studi di Palermo

Challenges of pluralism and challenges to pluralism: the legal contexts

2007-2008

Giorgio Pino is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Law at the Law School of the University of Palermo; he graduated from the University of Palermo with a degree in Law (1996), then received an LL.M. from the European Academy of Legal Theory (Brussels, 1997) and completed a post-graduate course in Law and Computers at the University of Bologna (2001). Professor Pino also holds a Ph.D. in Human Rights (University of Palermo, 2001). He served for three years at the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, Rome, 2002-2004).
His research interests mainly concern privacy rights, freedom of expression, legal reasoning, and constitutional interpretation. An editor of Diritto & Questioni pubbliche, an international on-line journal on philosophy of law and public policy, Professor Pino has extensively published in Italian and foreign journals, such as Ragion pratica, Analisi e diritto, and Law and Philosophy, and is the author of the book Il diritto all'identità personale. Interpretazione costituzionale e creatività giurisprudenziale (Il Mulino, 2003).

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 degli Studi di Roma Tre

The banning of a culture: intellectuals, illiterates, and censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy

2009-2010

Giorgio Caravale (Ph.D. 2000) is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Roma Tre. He was Lila Wallace - Reader's Digest Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Villa I Tatti (2006-2007). He has held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Rome "Sapienza" (2001-2003), Fondazione Luigi Firpo in Turin (2003-2005) and Fondazione Michele Pellegrino in Turin (2005-2006). He was a short-term fellow at the Institut d'Histoire de la Réformation of Geneva (2004), at the University of Madison, Wisconsin (2005), and at the Newberry Library of Chicago (2007). He is the author of many articles on book censorship and the Roman Inquisition and three volumes: L'orazione proibita. Censura ecclesiastica e letteratura devozionale nella prima età moderna (Florence, Olschki, 2003), Sulle tracce dell'eresia. Ambrogio Catarino Politi (1484-1553) (Florence, Olschki, 2007), and Il profeta disarmato. L'eresia di Francesco Pucci nell'Europa del Cinquecento (in press). He is currently working on a long-lenghth book on ecclesiastical censorship and Italian culture in the early modern age.

Université de Rouen

Pirro Ligorio (1512-1583) as a draftsman: imitation of antiquity and the representation of the body in Late Renaissance mythological drawings

2013-2014: Spring

Ginette Vagenheim is Professor of Latin Language and Literature and Humanistic Philology at the Université de Rouen in Haute-Normandie, Honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France, Life Member of Clare Hall in Cambridge and Fellow of Harvard University. After a Degree in Classical Philology at the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, she obtained a Master in Medieval and Renaissance Philology supervised by Giuseppe Billanovich at the Università del Sacro Cuore di Milano; she then obtained a doctorate in Ancient Art History and Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa supervised by Augusto Campana and Salvatore Settis.

During this time, she has been a Fellow in several institutions in Europe and in the USA: Harvard University --Villa I Tatti; The Getty Center for Humanities in Los Angeles; Clare Hall in Cambridge; The Warburg Institute; L'Ecole française de Rome; The Scaliger Institute in Leiden; and The Herzog-August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Università di San Marino by invitation of Luciano Canfora (dottorato di ricerca in scienze storiche) and at the Università degli studi di Firenze by invitation of Roberto Cardini (dottorato internazionale in civiltà dell'umanesimo e del Rinascimento).

She has published more than sixty contributions in several academic journals in the fields of antiquarianism (especially on Pirro Ligorio) and the history of classical scholarship in the Renaissance, the history of epigraphy in the Renaissance and historiography in the 19th century. She is a member or a referee in several editorial boards: Les cahiers de la Renaissance (Paris), Aevum (Milano), and Corpus delle opere firmate del Medioevo Italiano (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

She participates in several European projects: the committee for the publication of the works of Pirro Ligorio; the committee for the manuscripta epigraphica et manus epigraphicae project of the Universitat autonòma de Barcelona; the international seminar "L'antiquaria e i suoi metodi" of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa-Università degli studi di Firenze; the committee for the sixth centenary of Lorenzo Valla of the Università degli studi di Firenze; the committee for the bicentennial of the death of Gaetano Marini of the Bibiloteca Apostolica del Vaticano; the committee for the publication and study of humanistic texts of Paris-IV Sorbonne; and the committee for development of the epigraphical corpora of the Société française d'épigraphie romaine et de Rome. 

Princeton University

Pirelli Visiting Professor of Italian Studies

Gianni Riotta is a journalist, writer, and professor at Princeton University (in the French and Italian Department) and the Director of the Data lab at LUISS Guido University School of Government, Rome. He is Executive Vice Chairman at the Council for the USA and Italy. As a columnist he currently writes for La Stampa and The Atlantic; he was also editor of TG1 RAI and Il Sole 24 ore. He served as deputy editor for La Stampa and Il Corriere della Sera, and as a U.S correspondent and columnist for Il Corriere della Sera and L’Espresso; to this day he also collaborates with The BBC World Service. His columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, and Süddeutschen Zeitung. His books have been translated into various languages and have received numerous awards. Foreign Policy magazine and Prospect magazine included him in their ranking of “100 Global Thinkers.” He is a philosophy graduate from the University of Palermo, and he has an MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; he was awarded an honoris causa degree in Archivistica dell'Archivio di Stato, in recognition of his work to protect Italian cultural heritage. Recently he started and presented the talk show “47-35 Parallelo Italia” on RAI 3. A permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he divides his time between Rome and New York.

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...

Università di Bologna

Memory and political culture: a comparitive perspective

2009-2010: Spring

Gianfranco Pasquino (1942) graduated in Political Science from the University of Torino, supervisor Norberto Bobbio, and specialized in Comparative Politics at the University of Florence under the guidance of Giovanni Sartori. In 1975, after teaching at the University of Bologna and Florence, he became full professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. He has also been teaching for more than thirty years at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University. In 1974-75, he was Lauro de Bosis Lecturer in the History of Italian Civilization at Harvard. In 1978-79, he was Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. He has been visiting Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, Washington D.C., and at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the Fall Term of 1999, he was Fellow of the Juan March Institute in Madrid. In the Spring of 2001, he was Fellow of Christ Church College at Oxford and in 2007 of St Antony's, Oxford. He is life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
Among the founders of the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, he was its managing editor for seven years and co-editor for three years. Editor of the bimonthly journal Il Mulino (1980-1983), he is on the editorial board of several academic journals, notably: the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, European Political Science, Parliamentary Affairs, Revista Argentina de Ciencia Politica.
He has written widely on Italian politics and on Comparative Politics, most recently Sistemi politici comparati (2007, 3rd ed.,translated into Spanish and Portuguese) and Le istituzioni di Arlecchino (6th ed., www.scriptaweb.it). He has co-edited the Dizionario di Politica (3rd ed. ,2004) and edited Strumenti della democrazia (2007) .
From 1983 to 1992 and from 1994 to 1996 he served as Senator of the Italian Republic. He received two degrees ad honorem from the University of Buenos Aires and from the University of La Plata. In 2005, he was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. At the Italian Academy, he plans to write a book on the Theory of Political Development.

Universiteit van Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

A new era in the quest for dark matter

2023–2024: Spring

I am a Professor of Theoretical Astroparticle Physics at the Center of Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics of the University of Amsterdam. After an MSc at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and a PhD at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, I have held teaching and research positions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Padova, the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris, and the University of Zurich, before moving permanently to Amsterdam in 2011.

In 2011, together with a group of talented young faculty, I contributed to establish in Amsterdam the GRAPPA center of excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics, for which I acted as Spokesperson until 2019.

Since July 2019 I have been the Founding Director of the European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory, which aims to bring together the European community of theoretical astroparticle physicists and cosmologists.

I strongly believe in the importance of science outreach. I have written two popular science books and given a number of public lectures. In 2018, I launched a new initiative for the communication of science, the Premio Cosmos, for which I act as president.

Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy); University College London (UK)

What is peripersonal space, really?

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Giandomenico Iannetti directs the Neuroscience and Behaviour Laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology and is Honorary Professor of Neuroscience at University College London (UCL).

After a PhD from “Sapienza” University, he was a postdoc at the University of Oxford, where he became Lecturer after the award of a Royal Society University Fellowship. In 2009 he moved to University College London (UCL), where in 2014 he became Full Professor of Neuroscience. In 2017 he was a fellow of the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies. In 2018 he started the Neuroscience and Behaviour Laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology. His research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society, the European Research Council (ERC) and the UK Medical Research Council.

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 Ladies. Art, 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.

Stanford University

Climate and the effects of the change in weather variability on consumption, savings and investment

2012-2013: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Global Development and Finance

Giacomo De Giorgi graduated from the Universita' Luigi Bocconi in Milan.
His Ph.D., from the Department of Economics of the University College London, focused on development, labor economics, and applied microeconometrics.
In July 2006 he joined the Department of Economics at Stanford University. He is a member of BREAD, CEGA, CEPR, NBER and SCID/SIEPR.
He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, the NY Fed, UAB-MOVE, and Bocconi. His work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, the American Economic Journal, and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
He is currently working on: climate and development; business literacy and development; informality and productivity; risk sharing and consumption insurance; indirect effects of aid policies; demand estimation; social interactions; consumption inequality, migration; and evaluation of ALMPs.

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

Institut des mondes africains (IMAF), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (France)

Contemporary forms of damnatio memoriae: commemorative places of slavery in Guadeloupe

2024–2025: Spring

Gaetano Ciarcia is an anthropologist and Research Director at the CNRS/IMAF (National Centre for Scientific Research/African Worlds Institute) in Paris.

His current research focuses on the commemorative uses of the transatlantic slave trade and colonisation in Benin and the French West Indies, as well as the history of ethnology and evangelisation in Dahomey, now Benin. He is also interested in the place of fiction in ethnological and heritage discourses.

He is the author of various publications and documentary films on the institution of cultural, political and religious memories in Mali (Dogon country), southern Benin, and France (Bordeaux, Nantes, and Guadeloupe). He is the author of De la mémoire ethnographique. L’exotisme du pays dogon (2003) and Le revers de l’oubli. Mémoires et commémorations de l’esclavage au Bénin (2016) and, with director Jean-Christophe Monferran, three documentary films: Mémoire promise (2014); L’impasse Toussaint-Louverture (2019); Les ancêtres retournés (2020).

Ciarcia has edited or co-edited numerous collective publications. His most recent works include the documentary film Le Dahomey cérémoniel (2022) and the book Le Dahomey cérémoniel. Le cinéma de Francis Aupiais (2024). Since 2017, he has been conducting ethnographic research in Guadeloupe.

Gaetano Ciarcia has been a visiting scholar at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil; the Universidad Nacional San Martín/Istituto de Altos Estudios Sociales in Buenos Aires; and the Université d’État in Haïti. He is the editor of the journal Passés futurs and a member of the editorial board of the journal Cahiers d’études africaines.

 Università di Palermo

On the trail of Frederick II: European nationalism and the rediscovery of medieval architecture in Southern Italy

2010-2011: Fall

Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino studied in Palermo and Madrid (Progetto Erasmus at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura), took a Laurea in Architecture in 1999 and received her Ph.D. in History of Architecture from the University of Palermo in 2004. She has taught History of Architecture in Palermo (2004-2009) as "professore a contratto" and has has been granted numerous fellowships: Progetto Giovani Ricercatori at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in MÉxico City, Assegno di ricerca at the University of Palermo, DAAD Research Fellowship at the Technische Universität München, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, Humboldt-Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Technische Universität München. Her main interest is the History of Architecture in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. She focuses mostly on Eclecticism, Revivalism, Travelers and the Grand Tour, with particular attention to Italian-German relations. She has published widely on these themes; for example, she authored Serradifalco e la Germania. La Stildiskussion tra Sicilia e Baviera 1823-1850 (2004) and Francesco Saverio Cavallari (1810-1896). Architetto senza frontiere tra Sicilia Germania e Messico (2007). In 2004 she co-organized the international conference The Time of Schinkel and the Age of Neoclassicism between Palermo and Berlin and edited the acts of the conference (2006). Currently she is working on Italian Influence on German Architecture after the Second World War. Her research at the Italian Academy focuses on the impact of 19th-century European nationalism on the rediscovery and interpretation of southern Italian medieval architecture.

Università di Roma 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 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 Roma 'La Sapienza'

Roman Archaeological Heritage and Cultural Identity in Republican Italy 1946-1992

2003-2004: Spring

Gabriele Cifani, born in Rome in 1970, received a M.A. in Literature (1993), Ph.D. in Archaeology (2000) and Postgraduate Specialisation (2001) at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where he was a young research fellow from 2002-2003. From 1994 to 2003, he was recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ministero dell'Università e Ricerca, Aylwin Cotton Foundation (UK), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 1998 he was a visiting student in the Department of Archaeology of Cambridge University. Since 1996 he has been consultant in fieldwork activities for the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma. From 1997 to 2000 he also worked in Libya, as a member of the Italian Archaeological Mission of "Roma Tre" University at Leptis Magna.

His main research interests include archaic Roman architecture, the landscape archaeology of Italy and the history of archaeology. Among his most recent publications is the article "Notes on the Rural Landscape of Central Tyrrhenian Italy in the 6th-5th c. B.C. and its Social Significance," in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, vol. 15, 2002 and the book: Storia di una frontiera. Dinamiche territoriali e gruppi etnici nella media Valle Tiberina (Roma 2003, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato). At the Italian Academy, he will analyze the role of archaeological heritage as part of cultural memory in Italy during the five decades from the end of the Second World War to 1992.

Institut Jean Nicod

The territory of the self: between perception and action

2016-2017: Spring

Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. She pursues philosophical and experimental investigation of the notion of self-awareness, in its relation to social awareness and to bodily awareness. Questions about the notion of embodiment have been at the core of her research. The recent theoretical trend of embodied cognition tries to bring the mind to the body. In her work, she returns the body to the mind. She has a forthcoming book, Mind the Body, on bodily self-awareness to be published by Oxford University Press. She has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on social cognition, empathy, bodily sensations, pain, touch, body schema, peripersonal space, and the sense of bodily ownership. 

Web page: https://sites.google.com/site/fvignemont/home

Universität Hamburg (Germany)

Giotto and physics

2023–2024: Spring

I focus on the interrelations between art, natural philosophy, and science in early modern Europe. Between 2005 and 2013, I was a senior professor at Harvard University. In 2013, I was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at Hamburg University. Since 2019, I have been co-director of an interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Study on “Imaginaria of Force” in Hamburg, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (https://www.imaginarien-der-kraft.uni-hamburg.de/en.html). I published widely on Leonardo da Vinci, including the LVIII Lettura Vinciana (2020). Most recently, I published an extensive monograph on the concept of “enlivenment” in early modern Italian art (Quasi vivo. Lebendigkeit in der italienischen Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, Berlin –Boston 2021).

New York University/Columbia University

Neuroimaging of reward processing and decision-making

2009-2010

Franco Pestilli obtained a B.A. from La Sapienza University, Rome (Italy), specializing in Experimental Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. For his doctoral research, he worked in the laboratory of Marisa Carrasco at New York University, New York (USA).
Since his PhD, he has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Neuroscience of Columbia University, New York (USA), and as a Visiting Scientist at the Riken Brain Science Institute, Wako (Japan). He is currently working in the Laboratory of Vincent Ferrera at Columbia University. His research focuses on distinguishing the effects of attention and expected reward on behavior and neural response. In life, one attends to stimuli that are behaviorally relevant, and often relevant stimuli are those that will predict rewards. For this reason, the effects of attention and that of expected reward on neural response can be easily confounded. Pestilli is investigating how the neural mechanisms dedicated to control attention and predict reward interact to affect one's decisions.

Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza

Critical edition of Leopardi's translation from Greek moral prose and the use of Greek ethics in the early nineteenth century

2007-2008

D'Intino received both his Laurea and his PhD (1992) from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where he is now Professor of Italian literature and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. 

He has been lecturer in Italian literature at the Universities of Amsterdam (NL), Birmingham (UK), and Perugia. 

His first book (1989, 2nd edition 1998) was on L'autobiografia moderna (theory and history of the genre). In the last fifteen years his main research interest has been the work of Giacomo Leopardi, from both a philological and a comparativist point of view. He published the critical edition of Leopardi's Scritti e frammenti autobiografici (1995), an annotated edition of his verse translations from Greek and Latin, Poeti greci e latini (1999) and twenty-something essays on various aspects of his thought. He is working on the critical edition of Leopardi's prose translations from Greek (Isocrates, Epictetus, etc.) and on a book of essays on the Operette morali. 

Other research areas include Pirandello's short narrative (L'antro della bestia, 1992) and literary theory. 

In 1998 he founded, with Michael Caesar, the "Leopardi Centre" at the University of Birmingham. As Director of the Centre, he co-organised the International Conference "Leopardi and the book in the age of Romanticism" (October 1998), and many seminars, lectures and events. He is also chief editor (with Michael Caesar) of the first complete translation (in progress) of Leopardi's Zibaldone into English.

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.

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

University of Pennsylvania (USA) 

Narrative and materiality of Dante’s Divine Comedy 

2026–2027: Fall

Francesco Marco Aresu earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature (with a secondary field in classical philology) from Harvard University. He graduated in letters from the Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia and has a master’s from Stanford University and Indiana University. His areas of expertise are medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies and history of the book, medieval and humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory. 

He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, the manuscript tradition of Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the PetrArchive, associate editor for Heliotropia, and editor-in-chief of Bibliotheca Dantesca. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press. 

Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.

Website: figs.sas.upenn.edu/people/francesco-aresu

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/

Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte

Renegotiating memory and identity in the postwar Mezzogiorno: destruction, restoration, and reinvention of medieval architecture in Southern Italy

2016-2017: Spring

Francesco Gangemi is the scientific assistant at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte of Rome. A longtime collaborator of the Sapienza University of Rome, where he received his Ph.D. in the field of History of Medieval Art, he has also collaborated with museums and Soprintendenze, and with the State Archive of Rome, where he received the “Diploma in Archivistica, Paleografia e Diplomatica.” Between 2014 and 2016 he was awarded a Post-Doc Fellowship by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and in 2015 he was visiting scholar at Duke University (NC).

After publishing a book and some essays about Romanesque architecture and sculpture in central Italy, he worked on the Adriatic area during the Norman-Staufer age. He was co-editor of the books Il potere dell’arte nel Medioevo (2015), and Federico II e la riedizione dell’Iconavetere a Foggia (2014), and organized the international conferences “Il Piceno prima di Fiastra” (2010), “L’apogeo di Ravello nel Mediterraneo” (2015), and "Imperialis Ecclesia” (2016). He is currently researching the relationship between the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen and sacred architecture, and working on a second book on the changes of the built environment in Adriatic Italy during the Staufer age. At the Italian Academy, he will focus on the reinvention of medieval architecture in the postwar reconstruction of Southern Italy.

Web page: http://www.biblhertz.it/institut/mitarbeiter-und-gaeste/mitarbeiterdaten...

Università di Messina

Passion play and via crucis in northern Italy: History of art and social anthropology

2011-2012: Spring

Francesco Faeta is Professor of Cultural and Visual Anthropology at the University of Messina (Italy), where he is Vice-director of the Department of Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the PhD Program Anthropology and Cultural Studies. He is also Director of the School of Visual Ethnography (SEV) at the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione Integrata (College of Photography and Integrated Communications) in Rome.
He has been appointed guest speaker at several seminars and lessons; in Italian Universities and abroad (University of Calabria, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', University of Siena, University of Torino, University of Palermo, University of Basilicata, College "Suor Orsola Benincasa" of Naples, University of Salzburg, University of Toulouse, University of Paris " La Sorbonne", École Pratique des Hautes Études, École Française de Rome, University of Valladolid, University of La Curuña, etc.). Dr. Faeta's essays and ethnographic photographs have been published in the most reputable Italian reviews and in some of the most valued foreign reviews, including "Terrain" and "Gradhiva" in France. His essays and works have been translated in French, English, Spanish, German, Rumanian and Hungarian.
Director of an operative staff of the Research Project "Cultural Heritage" of CNR and, for Franco Angeli, publisher in Milan, of the collection "Imagines. Studi visuali e pratiche della rappresentazione" (Imagines. Visual studies and practices of the representation), he was a member of the National Committee for the Study of the Anthropological Heritage, founded by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Cultural Affairs. He is currently a member of AISEA (Italian Association for Ethnological and Anthropological Studies) and holds a board position at SISF (Italian Society for the Study on Photography).
Dr. Faeta has performed extensive research in the field of anthropology of Europe, focusing on Southern Italy and, in it, especially on Visual Anthropology production, the social and cultural organization of territories and folk- architectures, the ethnological and anthropological museums, and popular religious beliefs and the dynamics of festivals and rituals. He has a particular interest in the relationships between Anthropology and Art History, mainly in the field of popular religion, and is now engaged in the study of the cultural imaginary related with the making of Italian Nation-State; in a wide research project, carried on at an European scale, in the theoretical perspective of an Anthropology of memory, on cemeteries and remembrance techniques in the urban and rural contexts; in the study of the (ancient and contemporary) holy drama of Cerveno (Brescia), in Northern Italy.

Università di Roma

Climate changes from decade to century: flood/drought dynamics

2010-2011: Fall

Co-sponsored by the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia

Francesco Cioffi (Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering) is Associate Professor in Hydraulics in the 'Dipartimento di Idraulica Trasporti e Strade' of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza.' Dr. Francesco Cioffi's areas of expertise are experimental hydraulics (laboratory and field velocity and turbulence measurements), hydraulic and water quality mathematical models, solid transport models, and environmental hydraulics. He has collaborated on a significant number of projects funded by Italian public institutions. These projects have concerned a number of applied research topics: control and management of erosion phenomena in coastal zones, inshore and offshore aquaculture plants, recovery and management of the water quality of lagoons, rivers and lakes, control of tidal phenomena in the Venice lagoon, and the management of solid transport in river and reservoirs. Recently Prof. Cioffi has been involved in an international research project aimed at developing projections of mid-latitude rainfall patterns related to anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Brown University

Critical Edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Letters and the Idea of Concordia during the Late Middle Ages

2005-2006

Francesco Borghesi received his degree in Philosophy at the University of Bologna (2000) and his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Brown University (2004). He visited several foreign academic institutions such as the Seminar für Geistesgeschichte und Philosophies der Renaissance at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Germany) and the Warburg Institute in London (UK), where he has been a Frances A. Yates Short-Term Research Fellow. His research interests include late medieval and early modern literature, philosophy and theology.
Currently he is preparing a critical edition of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola's letters and, recently, has begun work on a project addressing the diffusion of the idea of Concordia during the late Middle Ages and aiming at exploring interactions among the literary, philosophical, historical and theological culture of his times.
As his main research project entails the edition of a humanist text, he has developed a strong interest in textual criticism, history of scholarship and philology. Furthermore he is actively collaborating to two on-line projects regarding, respectively, Giovanni Pico's Oration and his 900 Theses, based on a collaboration between the University of Bologna and Brown University. Having entered the somewhat uncharted territory of digital editions, he is also interested in the new philological models to experiment with and in issues that have to do with the function and goals of print versus electronic editions of the same texts.

Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

The birth of architectural criticism in early modern Italy

2022-2023: Spring

I published on several aspects of Renaissance Architecture, theory and historiography including books and essays on Giotto, Baccio Pontelli, Aristotele Fioravanti, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Michelangelo, Raphael, the Sangallo family, Gerolamo Genga, Medieval and Renaissance public architecture in Bologna, and religious and military architecture in the Marche region. I also published on building materials and techniques, history of design, painted architecture, Quattrocento architecture in Rome and Central Italy, the rediscovery of antiquity, and Marginalia on Renaissance architectural treatises. I dealt with Neo Renaissance architecture in New York and postwar engineering, focusing on structural engineer Mario Salvadori. I worked and published on Rudolf Wittkower and on Colin Rowe’s archival materials.

I am currently completing a book on Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s studies on Vitruvius. I was the recipient of several fellowships, including the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the Italian Academy, Columbia University and the Getty Research Institute. I am the director of the Serlio Digital Project (Avery Library, Columbia University) and I coordinated the study group of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola appointed by the Italian Ministry of Culture. I taught at Columbia University, New York and I have been Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London and at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

Webpage: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/f.benelli/en

Università di Padova and Columbia University

Combined analysis of multimodal brain imaging data for the study and prevention of major depressive disorders in high risk offspring

2011-2012: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Francesca Zanderigo has always enjoyed applying her mathematical skills to define and solve problems related to human health care. As a graduate student at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy, she focused on the quantitative analysis of cerebral hemodynamics in patients with carotid artery stenosis using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) (Zanderigo et al., IEEE Transaction on Biomedical Engineering 56(5), 2009, 1287-97), and the hypo/ hyperglycemia prevention in diabetics by on-line monitoring and prediction of blood glucose concentration (Sparacino et al., Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice 74, 2006, S160-S163; Sparacino et al., IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 54(5), 2007, 931- 937; Zanderigo et al., Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology 1(5), 2007, 645-651). As a Research Scientist for the interdisciplinary Division of Molecular Imaging and Neuropathology, Department of Psychiatry and New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University, she implemented mathematical models to analyze Positron Emission Tomography (PET) data in neuroreceptors system investigations. Specifically, Dr. Zanderigo developed a Bayesian approach to reduce the estimates variability in parametric images generation (Zanderigo et al., Nuclear Medicine and Biology 37, 2010, 443-51) and the application of alternative fitting methods to improve the sensitivity in occupancy studies (Zanderigo et al., Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism 30(7), 2010, 1366-72), and collaborated in the assessment of a minimally invasive approach for PET data analysis (Ogden et al., Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism 30(4), 2010, 816-26), the investigation of new radioligands (DeLorenzo et al., Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism 29(7), 2009, 1332-45; Milak et al., Journal of Nuclear Medicine 51(12), 2010, 1892-900), and their use in the study of the serotonin neurotransmitter system (Parsey et al., Biological Psychiatry 68(2), 2010, 170-8). She recently began working on the combined analysis of multimodal brain images (i.e. PET, MRI, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, functional MRI) to provide biomarkers for personalized treatment of Major Depressive Disorders in high risk offspring by predicting and identifying individual factors that may favor certain treatments over others. She is also investigating and developing a novel unified automated approach for PET non-invasive full quantification to promote the use of PET in clinical practice.

Universita' di Milano

The Figure in the Portrait. An Interdisciplinary Recognition 1850-1915.

2004-2005

Francesca Frigerio graduated summa cum laude in Foreign Languages and Literatures (English and French) at the University of Milan, with a thesis entitled "Modernism and urban culture: London in Dorothy Richardson's novels". In 2004 she has received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Milan, with a dissertation centered on the role of music - both as a theme and as an aesthetic model - in Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West's novels. While going on investigating the relationship between urban culture and women's writing (she is currently member of the editorial board of the "Literary London Journal"), she is now working on a project focused on the cultural history of the portrait, as it unfolds in England in the second half of the Nineteenth century. She has most recently published both on Rebecca West ("Under West(ern) Eyes: Rebecca West Reads Joyce", Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. XXVI, No.1, Fall 2002; "Music and the Feminine Aesthetics of Detail in Rebecca West's Harriet Hume", in Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches, edited by Bernard Schweizer, Palgrave, forthcoming) and on Dorothy Richardson (Musical Aesthetics and Narrative Forms in Dorothy Richardson's prose, Textus, Textus, XVI, No.1, 2003; "'A Filmless London': Flânerie and Urban Culture in Dorothy Richardson's Articles for Close Up", in The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London. Selected Essays from the 2002 Literary London Conference: Representations of London in Literature, (Rodopi Press, November 2004).

University of Parma (Italy) 

Alexander Bodini Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Social peripersonal space and bodily self-disturbances in schizophrenia 

2026–2027: Fall

Francesca Ferroni is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Parma. Her research focuses on how the brain generates the experience of the body in space—also known as peripersonal space—by integrating multisensory information.

Situated at the intersection of cognitive and clinical neuroscience, her research explores how multisensory information is combined to shape the boundaries of the bodily self. She is particularly interested in individual variability and in the plasticity of peripersonal space representations, examining how these processes adapt across contexts and differ across individuals.

A central line of her work addresses alterations of multisensory integration in schizophrenia. Through behavioral paradigms and neuroimaging approaches, she investigates how disruptions in the integration of sensory signals may contribute to disturbances of bodily self-awareness, offering new insights into the mechanisms underlying self-related disorders.

More broadly, her research aims to advance current theoretical models of body representation and to elucidate the neurobiological bases of the sense of self. By bridging neuroscience with clinical research, her work contributes to a deeper understanding of how embodied experience is constructed—and how it may become altered in psychopathology.

Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici

The classical antiquities trade between Italy and the United States, 1861–1939

2016-2017: Fall

Francesca de Tomasi (Lecce, 1985) is an archaeologist interested in the history of collecting and collections. She received her Ph.D. in Classical Antiquities and their Fortune in 2015 from the University of Rome Tor Vergata and she later obtained a post-doctoral Fellowship at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples. Her research focuses on the export and trade of antiquities in post-unification Italy and on the network of museums, collectors, art dealers, intermediaries, purchasing agents and scholars involved in the antiquarian market. Francesca will join the Italian Academy as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her research project aims to analyze the dynamics of the export of antiquities from Italy to the United States between 1861 and 1939, to reveal the extent of the trafficking of archaeological objects which today constitute a significant portion of American museum collections. Moreover, she will investigate how American museum culture was influenced by its connections with the flourishing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century antiquarian market, showing the deep connections between the market and the museums’ and collectors’ choices and artistic taste.

Web page: https://iiss-it.academia.edu/FrancescadeTomasi

University of Leeds

Literature and festivals in Renaissance Italy: a digital archive of texts and images

2014-2015: Fall

Francesca Bortoletti is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at at School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, for the European Research Council project "Italian Voices". She received her Ph.D. at the University of Bologna, Italy and at the Centre d’Étude Supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR), Tours, France. She held a three-years postdoctoral fellowship at University of Bologna and Research Associate for two years (2011-2013) at the Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota. In 2013, she was Visiting Research Scholar at European University Institute in Florence and Scuola Superiore Normale in Pisa. She taught formal courses in Italian literature and Theatre in Italy, France and USA. Her research interests are Italian Renaissance literature and performance as well as memory culture, with specific emphasis on the interactions between texts, oral culture, and images in humanistic and court culture. She has published several papers in international Academic journals and she is the author of two volumes, "Egloga e spettacolo nel primo Rinascimento. Da Firenze alle corti" (Bulzoni, 2008) and "L’attore del Parnaso. Profili di attori-musici e drammaturgie d’occasione" (Mimesis, 2012). She co-edited "Danza, cultura e società nel Rinascimento italiano" (Ephemeria, 2007).

Web page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20055/1464/francesca__bortoletti

New York University

Regulation of microtubules and actin cross-talk in oriented cell migration: the role of formins, APC protein and unconventional myosins

2007-2008

Francesca Bartolini began her studies at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," where she was trained as a geneticist and received her degree in Biology. In 2004 she earned her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology at New York University with a thesis on the characterization of two newly identified proteins with similar functions to tubulin-specific chaperones. The same year she moved to the laboratory of Dr. Gundersen at Columbia University, where she was awarded a grant by the "Telethon" Foundation (Italy) to investigate the role of formins, a class of tubulin and actin regulators that are also involved in the onset of a genetic syndrome that causes deafness. She has since focused on the basic understanding of regulated tubulin turn-over and on the cross-talk between the actin and the tubulin cytoskeletons in basic cellular processes such as oriented cell migration and adhesion. More recently, her work is also aimed at dissecting the role of unconventional myosins in the regulation of organelle trafficking through the selective stabilization of the tubulin cytoskeleton downstream of Rho GTPases, and discovering whether this process is also necessary in the establishment of neuronal synapses and long term memory.

Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, Seton Hall University (USA)

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on mood, craving, and relapses in drug users with depression

2023–2024: Spring

Fortunato Battaglia, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Medical Sciences and Neurology at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. Dr. Battaglia earned his medical degree from the University of Messina, Italy. He completed a residency in neurology at the University of Messina and a fellowship at the National Institute of Health (NINDS). Dr. Battaglia’s clinical and research interests include developing plasticity-based interventions for neuropsychiatric diseases, especially for patients with treatment-resistant depression, and neurodegenerative diseases. He has expertise in clinical neurophysiology and brain stimulation techniques including transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation. A primary aim of his translational research program is to investigate cortical plastic changes in motor, cognitive, and emotional circuits and to use this information to better understand the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric diseases and to further optimize treatment effectiveness, with a particular emphasis in brain stimulation therapies, and integrative medicine. In addition, has developed an international medical education research line focusing on investigating predictors of mental health and academic outcomes which gives medical student an opportunity to participate in mentored medical research. Under this mentorship model trainees develop skills, pursue their individual neuroscience research interests, and enhance their education beyond the core curriculum.

University of Sussex

Music in the Italian Renaissance home

2011-2012: Fall

Flora Dennis is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. After completing a doctorate in Musicology at the University of Cambridge (2002), she was a Research Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (2001-6); co-curating the V&A exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy (2006-7) and co-editing its accompanying book. She has been awarded fellowships by Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2007-8); the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (2010-11) and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Research Department at the V&A (2007- 11). She has published on music, sound and interiors in fifteenth and sixteenth- century Italy, and is currently working on a monograph about music and the visual and material culture of the domestic sphere.

University of Vermont

The Jews of Italy and Spanish imperial power

2010-2011: Fall

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Flora Cassen grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. She received her BA in Law and History from the Free University of Brussels, her MA in Comparative History from Brandeis University, and her PhD in History and Judaic Studies from New York University in 2007. At the Italian Academy, she will complete her book manuscript "Identity or Control: the Jewish badge in Renaissance Italy." Based on her doctoral research, this book studies the discriminatory marks, typically a yellow hat or a yellow badge, that the Jews were compelled to wear in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy. Her work contributes to understanding the social life of the Jews in Renaissance Italy, the relations they had with secular or religious authorities, and how clothing can be used to regulate society. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Belgian Academy of Rome, the Medieval Academy of America, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. In 2011 she will start working as an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Università di Roma La Sapienza

Italian and European Economic Policies in the Context of Changing US-EU Relationships

2005-2006

Fiorella Kostoris Padoa Schioppa received her Italian degree in the Department of Economics at Bocconi University in Milan. She has a Master of Science from the Graduate School of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now Professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza and teaches a senior seminar at the Department of Economics at Columbia University. She is also Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. She served for two terms on the board of the International Economic Association and has been a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research since 1989 and a Member of the Scientific Committee or the Advisory Board of numerous European institutions, in Brussels, London, and Paris and the Eurogroup of 50.

She is editor of the Economic Book Series for the Publisher Ulrico Hoepli; a Member of the Scientific Board of the Enciclopedia Treccani; one of the 7 members of the Comitato di Indirizzo per la Valutazione della Ricerca; and an editorialist for the daily newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and the Radio Radicale broadcast "Lessico dell'Economia".

Among many other distinctions Kostoris is Grande Ufficiale al Merito, nominated by the Italian President of the Republic in 2000, and Officier dans la Legion d'Honneur, nominated by the French President of the Republic in 2001.
She has published more than 100 papers and 20 books. Her research interests include macroeconomics and labour, public finance and European matters, gender equality, social mobility, regional economics, and the cultural heritage.

Università di Torino

Co-sponsored by the Physiology & Cellular Biophysics Department, Columbia University

Perpetuation of memory storage: a novel mechanism in the long-term maintenance of synaptic plasticity and behavior

2008-2009

Ferdinando Fiumara received his M.D. (2000) and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience (2005) from the University of Torino. He has continued his postdoctoral studies as an associate scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University and he is currently Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University of Torino. His doctoral and postdoctoral research has been focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the formation and plasticity of synaptic connections between neurons. In particular, he has studied the role of synapsins, a family of synaptic vesicle-associated proteins, and their phosphorylation by protein kinases in the regulation of neurotransmitter release and in the short-term plasticity of synapses. He has also studied the formation and the short-term plasticity of behaviorally relevant neuronal circuits reconstructed in vitro. Currently, he is developing the neuroelectronic interfacing of complex circuits with controlled morphology and predictable connectivity of individually identifiable invertebrate neurons in culture for long-term analyses of synaptic activity in neuronal networks. As a fellow of the Italian Academy he will conduct his research in the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University focusing on novel molecular mechanisms involved in the perpetuation of long-term plasticity and memory storage at the synaptic level through the action of prion-like proteins and persistently activated protein kinases.

Marcello Barbanera, University of Rome, La Sapienza
Marcello Basili, University of Siena
Hans Belting, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Luigi Bonatti, University of Trento
Richard Bosworth, University of Western Australia
Giovanna Borradori, Vassar College
Gian Luca Burci, World Health Organization
Paolo Calza Bini, University of Rome, La Sapienza
Donatella Campus, University of Essex
Jocelyne Cesari, Columbia University
Dimitris Chryssochoou, University of Exeter
Carol Clark, Amherst College
Paul Corner, University of Siena
Massimo di Matteo, University of Siena
Stefano D'Addona, Alma Mater Universita' di Bologna
Maria Teresa D'Arcangelo, Deputy Director of the International Women's Film Festival, Florence
Giovanni Dosi, St. Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa
Umberto Eco, University of Bologna
Giovanna Fossa, Politecnico di Milano
Margaret Gallucci, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University
Diego Gambetta, Oxford University
Gino Giugni, LUISS, Rome
Gustavo Ghidini, LUISS, Rome
Julia Grella, Musician and Musicologist, New York City
Ranajit Guha, Australian National University
Maria Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis, University of Cyprus
Stephen Hellman, York University
Pierangelo Isernia, University of Siena
Susanne Knaller, University of Graz
Mark Lazerson, University of Bologna
Nicola Lugaresi, University of Bologna
Martino Marazzi, University of Milano
Walter Mattli, Columbia University
Jenny McPhee, Literary Translator, New York City
Alberto Melucci, University of Milano
Elisabetta Mori, Historical Archivist, Archivio Historico Capitolino, Rome
Erik Mortensen, Environment, New York City
Massimo Paci, University of Ancona
Ted Perlmutter, New York University
Massimo Pesaresi, California State University
Eugenio Polito, University of Cassiano
Enrico Pugliese, University of Naples, Federico II
Stanislao Pugliese, Hofstra University
Lucy Riall, Birkbeck College, UK
Marco Santambrogio, University of Cagliari
Piero Santostefano, University of Ancona
Marco Scarsini, Universita' D'Annunzio, Pescara
Giancarlo Scoditti, University of Urbino
Giovanni Sergi, University of Ancona
Lorenzo Stanghellini, University of Florence
Francesco Stefanori, architect, The University of Rome 'La Sapienza'
Marla Stone, Occidental College
Wayne P. teBrake, SUNY Purchase
Fabrizio Tonello, Journalist
Giovanni Battista Traverso, University of Siena
Giogio Vercellin, University of Venice
Patrizia Veroli, Theater Historian

Università di Firenze

The emotional impact of color in contemporary cinema: aesthetics, science, and technology

2015-2016: Spring

Federico Pierotti is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florence, where he teaches Film History and Forms of Contemporary Cinema. His book La seduzione dello spettro: Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema (2012) regards color in film history as a central issue to modern media visual culture. Besides his work on color, Pierotti also has an interest in the history of post war Italian cinema, as well as in new wave and contemporary Portuguese films. His writings have been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Interfaces, Bianco e Nero, Fata Morgana, Quaderni d'italianistica and Colore e Colorimetria. He has participated in invitational lectures and international conferences on film, media and color studies. He is part of the editorial board of the academic journal Immagine: Note di Storia del Cinema. He is currently working on a book manuscript which draws upon his research on the emotional impact of color in digital cinema. In January 2014 he qualified to be an Associate Professor.

Web page: http://www.unifi.it/index.php?module=ofform2&mode=2&cmd=1&AA=2013&dip=20...

Université de Genève

What emotions can teach us about music: cognitivism, musical expressiveness and affective responses to music

2015-2016: Spring

Federico Lauria is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences and at the Philosophy Department of the University of Geneva. His main interests are in the philosophy of emotions, at the intersection of philosophy of mind and practical philosophy (ethics and aesthetics). He has recently obtained a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Geneva for his dissertation on desire. He is now working on several topics in philosophy of emotions and related areas, particularly desire, self-deception, character traits, musical emotions, hope, epistemic emotions, and the evil of death. He is also a member of the Center of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Neuchâtel.
At Columbia University, he will explore the relations between emotions and music. He will defend a new theory of musical expressiveness and musical emotions with the help of cognitive theories of emotions, in particular the appraisal theory of emotions that has been developed at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. 

Web page: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/collaborateurs/corps-intermediaire/pos...

Università di Roma

Comparative analysis of the Roman and Portuguese pepper trade

2012-2013

Federico De Romanis graduated from the Università di Roma "La Sapienza." He was a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples and received his doctorate in historical sciences from the Università della Repubblica di S. Marino in 1992. He has taught at the Università di Catania and at the Università della Tuscia, and is currently Associate Professor in Roman History at the Università di Roma "Tor Vergata." He is also a member of the Istituto Italiano per Africa e l'Oriente. Professor De Romanis's main fields of research are Indian Ocean trade in antiquity and the grain supply of ancient Rome. He is the author of Cassia, cinnamomo, ossidiana. Uomini e merci tra Oceano Indiano e Mediterraneo, L'Erma di Bretschneider, Roma 1996; the co-editor (with A. Tchernia) of Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India, Manohar, New Delhi 1997; and the co-editor (with S. Sorda) of Dal denarius al dinar: L'Oriente e la moneta romana, Istituto Italiano di Numismatica, Roma 2006.

Università di Roma La Sapienza

Galileo and the Roman Curia: modern science and Catholic Reformation c. 1610–1700

2011-2012: Fall

Federica Favino graduated in Philosophy from the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' and received her PhD in History from the University of Naples. She is currently working as a Research Fellow and Lecturer in History of Science at the Sapienza University of Rome. Dr. Favino's area of expertise is on Giovanni Battista Ciampoli (1589-1643), papal secretary and disciple of Galileo. She is the author of several essays which focus on the circulation of the "new science" in the papal court, the practice of experimental physics in Rome in the 17th century, and science teaching at the University of Rome from the 16th century to the Great Reform of Pope Benedict XIV.

University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” of Chieti–Pescara (Italy)

Alexander Bodini Fellow in the Application of AI Tools and Models in the Early Detection of Pancreatic Cancer

BAG3-dependent pathways in pancreatic cancer explored through AI and quantitative proteomics

2026-2027: Fall

Federica Di Marco is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies and Technology (CAST), University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” of Chieti–Pescara, Italy. She earned her PhD in Medical Biotechnologies in 2025 and specializes in mass spectrometry-based proteomics and multi-omics approaches for biomarker discovery and translational medicine. Her research integrates proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, and bioinformatics to investigate disease mechanisms and identify clinically relevant molecular signatures. During her doctoral training, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where she contributed to interdisciplinary projects at the interface of neuroscience, immunology, and omics sciences. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications and has received awards from both the Italian and European proteomics communities. At the Italian Academy, she will explore the integration of artificial intelligence and proteomics for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, with the goal of developing innovative strategies for biomarker discovery and precision oncology.

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. 

Università di Pisa

Randomness and Compactness in Information

2003-2004: Fall

Fabrizio Luccio was born in 1938. He received the Dr.Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1962, and the Libera Docenza in electronic computers from the Italian university system in 1968. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. After an industrial experience in the research laboratories of Olivetti, he began his academic career at the Politecnico di Milano. In 1966 he moved to M.I.T. as a staff member at Project MAC, then he became a professor at the University of Southern California, and then at New York University, pursuing research in theoretical and algorithmic aspects of circuit synthesis.
In 1971 he returned permanently to Italy, as Lecturer and later Professor of Informatics at the University of Pisa, where he also served as Department Chairman for six years, and as Coordinator of the newly established Ph.D. program in Informatics for another six years. There he also set up, and is still directing, a successful research group in algorithmica. He spent several sabbatical periods as a visiting professor at UCLA, the University of Illinois, the National University of Singapore, and Carleton University in Ottawa. He has been a visiting scientist at T.J. Watson Research Center of IBM, USA, and a distinguished foreign scholar at the NTT LSI Laboratories in Morinosato, Japan. He has also been a distinguished scientist in the city of Ottawa, sponsored by a Canadian fund to carry on cooperative research with the local universities. He has pursued intense activities with UNESCO, for the dissemination of informatics in developing countries. For these activities he received in 1998 the title of Honorary Professor from the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, Peru, the third oldest university on the American continent. He received a high degree of recognition for outstanding research, and was nominated a Fellow of the IEEE in 1983.
In addition to his studies in computer science, Professor Luccio is particularly interested in the relations among different fields of science and general culture, in the search of common concepts and paradigms. He has recently published a book on algorithmic aspects arising in the most diverse fields of knowledge, and plans to further pursue these studies, with particular attention to the role of random processes.

University of St. Andrews

Bernini, S. Andrea al Quirinale, and early modern architectural representation

2012-2013: Fall

Fabio Barry studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, and briefly practiced the profession before receiving his Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. He was subsequently David E. Finley Fellow at CASVA before taking up a lectureship at the University of St. Andrews. Much of his published research has concentrated on artistic production in Rome, particularly Baroque architecture, and from liturgy to light metaphysics. His most recent work, published or in press, has been on medieval and antique art, particularly sculpture. An ongoing interest, the subject of his Ph.D., is the imagery of marble in the visual arts and literature from antiquity until the age of enlightenment, in which he attempts to identify the evocative qualities of materials (the "Material Imagination") before the era of mass production and standardization distanced materials from the realm of nature and myth.

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

A paper archive of everything written: Ulisse Aldrovandi's Pandechion Epistemonicon (Fall 2011 and Spring 2012)

2011-2012

Fabian Krämer is a historian interested primarily in the History of Science in early modern Europe. He has been trained as both a historian and literary scholar. Both of these disciplinary backgrounds are present in his current research, which pays special attention to the scholarly practices of reading and writing that were in use across the porous disciplinary boundaries of the "Republic of Letters", the early modern world of learning. Other recent research interests include the history of the case history and the history of the book.
Fabian Krämer recently finished his PhD dissertation (How Did a Centaur Get to Early Modern London? Observation and Reading in the Study of Nature, ca. 1550-1650), which he wrote under the supervision of Professor Helmut Zedelmaier at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and Professor Lorraine Daston at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin. At the latter institution, his dissertation project was part of a research project on The History of Scientific Observation. He also received grants for doctoral research at Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and at Forschungsbibliothek Gotha. Furthermore, the Fazit and the Gerda Henkel Foundations supported his dissertation project.
His research contributions to date correspond to the fields of specialization mentioned above. Fabian Krämer's publications primarily deal with matters of early modern history of science and especially the "how" and "why" of description and depiction of "natural particulars" in early modern medicine and natural history. His most recently published article examines the rich biography of one of the woodcuts commissioned by the eminent Bolognese natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) for his huge encyclopedia of natural history, the depiction of a curious, two-legged centaur.

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.

Website: https://www.zikg.eu/personen/fjonietz

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.

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.

Università di Bergamo

The political contribution of Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Gaetano Salvemini to Hermann Broch's democratic project

2010-2011: Fall

Ester Saletta graduated in English and German Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy, 1995). She obtained her PhD in Austrian Literature at the University of Vienna (Austria, 2005). She won several Austrian scholarships (ÖAD in 1999; BMBW in 2005; Linzer StifterHaus in 2007) and she taught Italian at the Language International Center of the University of Vienna (2001-2004). She is now teaching German as foreign language in the Italian secondary school system. At present she collaborates with the Law Faculty of the University of Bergamo (Italy) in the Equal Opportunities field. She is an active member of the Viennese Friedrich Hebbel and Theodor Kramer Societies, of the International Centre "Hermann Broch" (IAB), of the International German Association (IVG) and of the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association (MALCA).

Università di Torino

The emergence of modernity in 17th century Italian literature

2008-2009: Spring

Erminia Ardissino is presently Ricercatore confermato in Letteratura Italiana at the Università di Torino, Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione. She obtained a Masters Degree in Romance Languages at the University of Georgia in Athens, a Ph.D. at Yale University, and the Dottorato di Ricerca in Italianistica-Letteratura Umanistica at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. She has had several essays published on Dante, Petrarch, Humanism, Tasso, Baroque Italian Literature, Manzoni, etc., in the most important journals in the philological and literary field. She has worked for the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, and she is on the editorial board of Testo. She has published two volumes on Torquato Tasso: "L’aspra tragedia". Poesia e sacro in Torquato Tasso (Florence, Olschki, 1996) and Tasso, Plotino, Ficino. In margine a un postillato (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003); a volume on baroque sacred oratory: Il Barocco e il sacro. La predicazione del teatino Paolo Aresi tra letteratura, immagini e scienza (Vatican City, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001), and a book on seventeenth century Italian literature (Il Seicento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005). She has prepared the critical edition of the Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare di Giovanni di Bonsignori da Città di Castello and of the Operetta by Angelo Galli (both came out at the Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, Bologna, 2001 and 2006). She also edited Poemi biblici del Seicento (Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2005), the Trattato delle acutezze di Matteo Peregrini (Turin, RES, 1997), and a selection of Galileo’s letters (with commentary; Rome, Carocci, 2008). Together with Sabrina Stroppa she has written Leggere testi letterari (Milano, Bruno Mondadori-Paravia, 2001). She has organized two conferences on Dante: Dialoghi con Dante. Riscritture e ricodificazioni della Commedia (2004) and Etica e teologia nella "Commedia" (2006; the first proceedings came out in 2007, the second are in print). She has just finished an essay on the liturgical aspects of Dante’s Commedia.

Fordham University

Prodigious sounds: music and learning in the world of Athanasius Kircher

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Eric Bianchi is Assistant Professor of Music at Fordham University in New York City. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011. His research examines the intellectual cultures of music in the early modern period. At the Italian Academy he will investigate the musical theories of Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher against the backdrop of upheavals in seventeenth-century scientific and humanistic scholarship.

Web page: http://www.fordham.edu/info/22907/music_faculty_and_staff/5666/eric_bianchi

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

2022-2023: Spring — [Visiting Fellow] The driving role of art in the breeding of a new man

2018-2019: Fall — The descent of the image and the creation of the New Man

Eric Michaud, b. 1948, is Directeur d’études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, where he holds the Professorship for Histories and Ideologies of Contemporary Art. His research interests lie in the relationships between art, politics, propaganda and the anthropological notions of race and filiation related to images.
Prior to joining the Ehess he was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg (1972-1998). He served as a Visiting Professor at the The Johns Hopkins University (1991-1992 and 2004), at Duke University (2003) and at the University of Virginia (2005). Selected Honors include an Institute for Advanced Study Membership (Princeton, 2010), a Clark Art Institute Fellowship (Williamstown, 2014) and a Getty Resarch Institute Fellowship (Los Angeles, 2015).
His books include Les invasions barbares. Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, Gallimard, 2015 ; Spanish transl. Adriana Hildalgo, 2017 ; English transl. forthcoming, MIT Press, 2019),  The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (transl. Janet Lloyd, Stanford University Press, 2004), Histoire de l’art : une discipline à ses frontières (Paris, Hazan, 2005), Fabriques de l'homme nouveau, de Léger à Mondrian (Paris, Carré, 1997).

Web page: https://www.ehess.fr/fr/personne/eric-michaud

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.

Università di Roma 'La Sapienza'

Enumerative Geometry

2003-2004

Spring

Enrico Arbarello is a professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza". He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1973 and is currently specializing in geometry. Of particular interest to Dr. Arbarello are algebraic curves, their moduli and the topology of moduli spaces. In addition, he works on the geometrical aspects of the theory of non-linear differential equations of the KdV type. He has taught at a number of international universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the Institut Henri Poincarè in Paris. At the Italian Academy, his research will focus on the geometry of algebraic curves.

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.

Universität St. Gallen

The sting of the image

2015-2016: Spring

Emmanuel Alloa is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), as well as Senior Research Fellow at the NCCR eikones and Lecturer in Aesthetics at the Départment d'Arts Plastiques at the University of Paris 8-Saint Denis. He holds a binational Ph.D. in philosophy (Paris I-Panthéon/Freie Universität Berlin). His research has its main focus in Continental philosophy on the one side and Aesthetics on the other, with a special emphasis on the question of images and their powers. Among his book publications: La résistance du sensible. Merleau-Ponty critique de la transparence (2nd edition 2014; Spanish translation 2009, Chinese, Brazilian and English translation forthcoming) and Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie (2011). During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will be working on a book project dedicated to "The Sting of the Image."

Web page: http://www.unisg.ch/en/schools/humanities+and+social+sciences/ueber+shss...

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Iconic normativity: the case of advertising images

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009). Web page: http://cehta.ehess.fr/index.php?682

McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research - University of Cambridge

Body ornaments in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Italy

2013-2014: Fall

Emanuela Cristiani's research is focused on the study of technological and functional aspects of material culture (stone knapped and ground stone and osseous tools, ornaments) in order to understand cultural traditions embedded in the way objects were produced and used in the past. Emanuela Cristiani's methodology integrates different analytical techniques such as: the study of manufacturing and use-wear traces, micro-residues, zooarchaeology, experimental archaeology, anthropological and ethnographic comparisons.

In her PhD research (University of Rome "La Sapienza"), Emanuela Cristiani has analysed postglacial adaptive strategies and Mesolithic-Neolithic transitional processes in the eastern Alpine region by examining techno-functional tactics related to the inhabitation of mountainous landscapes. Her results gave a new perspective on the nature of the Meso-Neolithic transition in the eastern Alpine region by emphasising the role of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic traditions in the formation of early Neolithic identities.

In the course of her post-doctoral appointments (Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and Marie Curie IEF Post-doctoral fellowship at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research - University of Cambridge), Emanuela Cristiani has been investigating Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene adaptations in two contrasting areas—the Eastern Adriatic coast and the central Balkans—by applying the same integrated methodological approach to the study of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic osseous tools, ground stones tools and ornaments. Through this research Emanuela Cristiani has been able to characterise foragers' osseous technologies and ornamental traditions in the Balkans.

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

The admissible content of auditory experience.

2014-2015: Fall

Elvira Di Bona obtained her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the Institut Jean Nicod – École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan in 2013. Her dissertation, co-tutored by Roberto Casati and Michele Di Francesco, was on auditory perception. During her Ph.D. course, she spent research periods at the New York University, as a Fulbright Scholar, and at the University of Sydney, as an ARIA (Association for Research between Italy and Australasia) Grantee. She got a violin diploma at the Conservatorio of L'Aquila and Terni, and completed the "High Specialization Course in Music Studies – Solo Violin Performance" at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia (Rome) in 2008. She is currently Research Affiliate at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research aims at developing a theory about the way in which, by audition, we perceive both objects' features (such as their texture or shape) and the space and time in which those objects are placed. In addition, she is working on a book on Frank Jackson's knowledge argument and on a project on aesthetics normativity sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published articles on pitch, the auditory perception of causation and sound in peer-reviewed international journals. At the Italian Academy she will be working on the admissible contents of auditory experience, which has been recently funded also by the Fondazione Franco e Marilisa Caligara to be developed at the University of Turin, Italy.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Touching Art: Intimacy, Embodiment, and the Somatosensory System

2003-2004

Ellen Esrock is an Associate Professor of Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Professor Esrock received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. Her publications include The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and a translation of Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Poetics of James Joyce (Harvard University Press, 1989.) Drawing on contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Professor Esrock has focused her research on the role of mental images, particularly visual and somatosensory, in our experience of visual art and literature. For the 2003-4 Fellowship year at the Italian Academy she will explore a process by which viewers can use their somatosensory systems to shift their sense of bodily boundaries in order to bring themselves into more intimate relationships with art objects.

Università di Torino

When The Prince travelled to Egypt: politics and ideology in 19th- and 20th- century Arabic translation of Machiavelli

2014-2015: Spring

I currently hold a research and lecturing position at the University of Turin. After having obtained my PhD from the University Sapienza (Rome) in 2009, I was postdoctoral fellow at the research programme Zukunftsphilologie at Freie Universitat in Berlin (2011-2012) and an Herzog–Ernst Thyssen Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Gotha research library (2012). My research interests are comparative literature in the Mediterranean context (particularly focusing on the transmission of texts in the early modern Mediterranean world) and exchanges and relations between Italian and Arab intellectual worlds. My project at the Italian Academy aims to study the translation and the reception of Machiavelli's Il Principe in Egypt between 18th and 20th centuries.

Web page: http://www.dipartimentolingue.unito.it/Benigni/oss-home.asp

University of Pennsylvania

Architectural culture in translation: postwar Italian cities and African villages

2016-2017: Fall

Dr. Elisa Dainese is an architect and a historian, and she is currently a lecturer and Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is developed in connection with the University of Pennsylvania (History of Art Department), Harvard University (Department of African and African American Studies), and the IUAV University of Venice (Faculty of Architecture). The project explores the key role that sub-Saharan Africa played in the development of modern architecture in Europe and America from the 1940s to the 1970s.

In 2012, Dr. Dainese earned her PhD in Architectural Design at the IUAV University of Venice (Italy), with a dissertation focused on post-war architecture, Aldo van Eyck, and the fascination for Dogon art and architecture of Mali (Africa). Dr. Dainese is the author of articles and essays published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (“Histories of Exchange: Indigenous South Africa in the South African Architectural Record and the Architectural Review”, Dec 2015), Le Corbusier, 50 years later (2015), New Urban Configurations (2014), Nuove qualità del vivere in periferia (2013), Landscape and Imagination (2013), and Catalogo della Mostra Internazionale Triennale d’Architettura Milano (2012).

Dr. Dainese is a colloquium member of the Humanities+Urbanism+Design initiative, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation at MIT. Dr. Dainese served as co-curator of both the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010), IUAV AFRICA - Rwanda Pavilion, and the Milan Triennale of Architecture (2013) where she focused on World Architecture.

Web page: www.elisadainese.com

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Università La Sapienza

Spanish physicians in Rome between Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Protagonists, practices, and the circulation of knowledge (1492–1598)

2009-2010

Author of several papers on early modern medical culture and practices in Sixteenth-Century Rome, she received her Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Università La Sapienza in 2007. Before coming to the Italian Academy she was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2008/2009), Attaché Temporaire d'Enseignement et de Recherche at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (2007/2008), and member of international projects such as the program Sciences et capitales européennes : revisiter les origines de l'espace public des savoirs (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle) - Young Researchers Programme 2006-2009 ANR-France.

Worcester College - Oxford University

“Le cose lontane, vicine”: early eighteenth-century Europe and non-European architecture (1695–1725)

2014-2015: Spring

I hold higher degrees in both architecture and architectural history from the University IUAV in Venice, where I received a Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urbanism in 2011. I am currently (2011-2014) Scott Opler Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford, where I am completing a book on the British architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) and eighteenth-century Oxford.
In the past ten years my research and publications have spanned European architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries with a focus on Italy, France, and Britain. I am particularly interested in the relationship between architecture and antiquarian studies within the European Republic of Letters, architectural drawings, the history of art collecting, the libraries of artists, the spaces of public institutions, and European encounters with non-European art. My various projects have received the support of the Paul Mellon Centre in London, the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, the Samuel Kress Foundation, and the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome.
The new research project which I will develop at the Academy aims to recreate the European architect’s mental picture of non-European architecture at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The project deals with visual and textual printed sources available at the time, focusing in particular on travel literature.
http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/faculty/staff/profile/pistis.html

Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Cultivating adaptive capacity: leveraging local engagement for safeguarding community-rooted heritage amid pluvial flooding

2026–2027: Spring

Eleonora Melandri is a member of the Architectural Restoration research group at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna. After her BA in Architecture and Building Processes and MA in Architecture, she earned her PhD from the same University, defending a dissertation dedicated to Disaster Risk Management in archaeological contexts in relation to climate-related hazards, with a specific focus on emergencies connected to extreme weather events. During her doctoral program, she was a PhD Visiting Candidate at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK.

Dr. Melandri lectures on heritage safeguarding and conservation at the University of Bologna and the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. She is also a member of the Italian Society for the Restoration of Architecture (SIRA) and Blue Shield Italy.

Before commencing her Fellowship at the Italian Academy at Columbia University, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, working on several national (PRIN) and European research projects (Horizon 2020, Interreg, Horizon Europe, and EUI). Her research focuses mainly on the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage and risk management strategies, topics on which she has published extensively in international peer-reviewed literature.

At the Italian Academy, she will continue her research mapping the relationship between climate phenomena and impacts on local heritage and its communities through her project, "Cultivating Adaptive Capacity: Leveraging Local Engagement for Safeguarding Community-Rooted Heritage Amid Pluvial Flooding.

website: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/eleonora.melandri3

Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Ars Oblivionalis: Digital techniques of remembering and forgetting

2014-2015: Fall

Co-Sponsored by Columbia's INCITE (Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics)

Elena Esposito teaches Sociology of Communication at the University of Modena-Reggio Emilia (I). She works with the theory of social systems preferably on issues related with the social management of time, including memory and forgetting, fashion and transience, probability calculus, fiction and the use the time in finance. Her current research projects focus on the possibility and forms of forgetting on the web and on the proliferation of rankings and ratings for the management of information.
She published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory, memory theory and sociology of financial markets. Among them The Future of Futures. The Time of Money in Financing and Society, 2011; Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität, 2007; Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode, 2004; Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft, 2002.

Web site: http://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/dettaglio/elespos

Università di Torino

Biodiversity: the methodological challenges

2012-2013: Fall

A graduate of the University of Turin, Elena Casetta received her PhD in Philosophy from the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Naples. She has been a Visiting Post-doctoral Fellow at IHPST (Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques), CNRS/Paris, and she is a currently a member of the Laboratory for Ontology at the University of Turin, where she is also serving as an associate editor of the Rivista di Estetica.
Her areas of specialization are the philosophy of biology, analytic ontology, and metaphysics, and her areas of competence range from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of language. Her current research interests focus on the Species Problem and Biodiversity.
Among her recent and forthcoming publications: La sfida delle chimere. Realismo, pluralismo e convenzionalismo in filosofia della biologia [The Chimera Challenge. Realism, Pluralism, and Conventionalism in the Philosophy of Biology; Milan, Mimesis, 2009); Questioni di vita. Una introduzione alla filosofia della biologia [Life Matters. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology; with A. Borghini, Rome, Carocci, forthcoming); Making Sense of Gender, Sex, Race, and the Family (with V. Tripodi, eds.; HumanaMente, vol. 22, forthcoming).

Princeton University

Of Language and the Lodestone

2003-2004

Eileen Reeves is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her area of specialization is the early modern scientific literature of Italy, France, and England, and she is the author of . She is currently finishing Evening News: Early Modern Journalism, Optics, and Astronomy, and is beginning a new project on the cultural context of the investigation of magnetism in seventeenth-century Europe. Her particular focus will be the proposed use of the magnet in a series of unworkable communication devices.

Independent Scholar

"L'ebreo": a newly discovered play by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger

2014-2015: Spring

For nearly forty years, I have been working in Italian—primarily Florentine—archives, investigating Medici art patronage and collecting, cultural relations between Tuscany and Spain, and (most recently) Florentine Jewish history. My publications include various articles and four books: "Patterns in Late Medici Art Patronage" (Princeton, 1983), "After Vasari: History, Art and Patronage in Late Medici Florence" (Princeton, 1988), "Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis" (Toronto, 2011) and "A Jew at the Medici Court: The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo, 1615-1621". 

An art historian by training, I completed a Ph.D. at Oxford University, taught in the Fine Arts Department at Harvard University and founded the Medici Archive Project in Florence, which I directed for many years. My latest project focuses on Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger's newly discovered five-act comedy, "L'Ebreo / The Jew" (1613)—which I will be developing at the Italian Academy as both a scholarly publication and a performance piece.
http://www.secretplacesitaly.net

Princeton University

A life of Lorenzo Da Ponte

2013-2014: Fall

Edmund White has published some 25 books, including novels, essays, travel books, biographies, plays and autobiographies. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. He has been made an officer in the French order of Arts and Letters and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of Jean Genet. He has also published short biographies of Marcel Proust and Rimbaud, for which he won the Premio Internazionale Mondello in Sicily. His novel Hotel de Dream is about an episode in the life of Stephen Crane; his novel Fanny is about Frances Trollope (mother of the author) and Frances Wright, the Scottish founder of an American utopia. He has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and New York University, where he was director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. His best-known novel is A Boy's Own Story. He also won some attention for his autobiographies, My Lives and City Boy (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Next year Bloomsbury will publish Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. He frequently publishes in the New York Review of Books.

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.

University of Cambridge (U.K.)

Consulting Director for the NOMIS Project on Prehistoric Mobility and the Spread of Agriculture in Eurasia

2019-2022: year-round

NOMIS Foundation Fellow

Dušan Borić received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom before joining Columbia's Italian Academy as a Fellow (in 2017-18) and then returning to work with the NOMIS Foundation Project on migrations and mobility. 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 in the eastern Mediterranean. He has written about various aspects of mortuary and corporeal symbolism, including the study of personal adornments and representational imagery, mortuary practices, 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 bioarchaeology, archaethanatology, palaeodietary studies, and radiocarbon dating in conjunction with Bayesian statistical modeling.

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.

See more about "On the Move": Prehistoric Mobility and the Spread of Agriculture in Eurasia (the NOMIS Foundation project), including book publications and symposia that have developed from this project. 

See here for the CV added in 2024. 

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

University of Miami

Nationalists against the nation: 19th century projects for a multinational Europe

2008-2009

Dominique Kirchner Reill specializes in Modern European history with particular emphases on the Nineteenth Century, regionalism, nationalism, Italy, and the Balkans, as well as cultural and intellectual history. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami in Florida. 

During her time at the Italian Academy she will be working on finishing her manuscript with the tentative title "Nationalists against the nation: 19th century projects for a multinational Europe," based largely on her dissertation. The book examines a group of local activists living in mid-nineteenth-century Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia (part of current-day Croatia) who pushed for the formation of a multi-national Adriatic state system along the lines of Belgium and Switzerland. These multi-national activists regarded their project as realist, not utopian, arguing that in a trade-oriented maritime world where Italian, German, and Slavic dialects were used interchangeably, and residents adhered to either Catholic, Christian Orthodox, Jewish, or Protestant faiths, no one language or national identity could be promoted without provoking intolerance and bloodshed. An article based on this research has been published in the volume Different paths to the nation. Regional and national identities in Germany, Italy, and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1830-1870 (2007). Research for this project was conducted in Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia and was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, the German Marshall Research Fellowship, the Delmas Foundation Grant for Independent Research on Venetian History and Culture, and the Whiting Foundation Fellowship among others. 

Professor Reill has also been an active member of Columbia University’s Institute for Social Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and NYU’s Remarque Institute. At the University of Miami, Professor Reill teaches courses on Nineteenth Century Europe and post-World War II Europe, Italy, and the Balkans.

Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi - Torino

"Too many for one": Eugenio Montale's interlocutors, 1917-43

2012-2013: Spring

Domenico Scarpa (B.A. in Political Science, Naples «L'Orientale», 1991; Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Universities of Trento and La Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III, 2004) is a literary consultant for the Turin-based Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi, a regular contributor to the daily Il Sole - 24 Ore, and the editor of the third and last volume (Dal Romanticismo a oggi) of Einaudi's Atlante della letteratura italiana, directed by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà.
For Italian publishing houses such as Einaudi, Mondadori, Feltrinelli, Adelphi, Sellerio, Utet, :duepunti, and Avagliano he has been the translator of Jonathan Coe, Philippe Forest, and Cathleen Schine as well as the editor of works by – among others – André Breton, Italo Calvino, Fruttero & Lucentini, Natalia Ginzburg, Mario Soldati, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
He has been a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2007-2010) and has taught Italian Literature at the universities of Naples «L'Orientale» and Milano-Bicocca, and at Middlebury College (Vermont). He is the author of three monographic books: on Italo Calvino (1999), Natalia Ginzburg (2010), and Franco Lucentini (2011; winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize "Novecento in Saggio" for 2012); of the collection Storie avventurose di libri necessari (2010); and of Il segno del chimico. Dialogo con Primo Levi, printed by Einaudi and staged by Valter Malosti in Italy and by John Turturro in New York.

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Forms of transmission of anatomical knowledge: drawings and three-dimensional models in the age of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Vesalius

2007-2008

Domenico Laurenza earned his doctorate in Historical Studies from the Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici (San Marino, 1996; Ph.D.) after training in medicine at the University of Naples (Laurea, 1991). He devotes his research principally to the relationship between scientific models of nature and the theory and practice of art in Early Modern Europe. In particular, he specializes in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and in Renaissance anatomical illustrations, considering the images from both artistic and scientific perspectives.
He is a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florence and collaborates with the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (IMSS, Florence). He has spent periods of research at the Warburg Institute in London (Frances A. Yates Fellowship, 1995), at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London (Wellcome Research Travel Grant, 1994), at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Mellon Fellowship, 2006-7) and, as visiting professor, at McGill University in Montreal (2006-7). He is the author of several books, some appearing in English, French and German translation; select titles include: De figura umana. Fisiognomica anatomia e arte in Leonardo (Leo S. Olschki, Firenze, 2001); Leonardo. La scienza trasfigurata in arte (Milano, Le scienze/Scientific American 2000); La ricerca dell'armonia. Rappresentazioni anatomiche nel Rinascimento (Leo S. Olschki, Firenze, 2003); Leonardo on flight (Giunti, Firenze, 2005); and Leonardo's Machines: Da Vinci's Inventions Revealed (David & Charles, Devon, 2006). In addition he has published articles in scholarly journals such as The Burlington Magazine, Nuncius, ALV Journal, Raccolta Vinciana, and Micrologus.

Università degli Studi di Messina

Adjunct Associate Research Scientist

Mirror neuron system and art perception

2006-2007

Domenica Crupi received her Italian degree in medical school in 2002 from the University of Messina (110/110 cum laude) and she discussed a thesis on "Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study". At the present she is in the last year of her residency in Neurology at the University of Messina. From the beginning of her residency she worked at the department of Neuropathology and, in particular, she took multiple sclerosis in-patients' and out-patients' clinical care at the Regional Center for Management of Multiple Sclerosis. From June 2005 to November 2006 she worked at department of Neurophysiology in Messina as electromyographist. In summer 2006 she attended a course in clinical neurosciences and neuroanatomy at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The main research experience of Dr Crupi is on transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive technique used to study the function of the human central motor system in health and disease. She has been working in the Prof. Quartarone's laboratory since March 2002 focusing her activity on movement disorder pathophysiology (dystonia in particular).
At the Italian Academy she will investigate the changes in cortico-spinal excitability and within intracortical circuits induced by observation of a work of art, during its mental representation and by observation of the real action itself, using transcranial magnetic stimulation. The experiments will be performed in Professor Battaglia's laboratory at City College of New York.
She was founder and is currently President and Health Director of the local section of "AVIS", the association of voluntary blood donors which operates in collaboration with the Transfusional Center in the city of Reggio Calabria. She is also member of "GADCO", an association for the promotion of umbilical cord donation.

Università di Firenze

The censorship of Benvenuto Cellini's Trattati

2013-2014: Spring

After receiving a B.A. in Medieval and Renaissance Philology from the University of Florence in 2009, in 2013 Diletta Gamberini obtained an international Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the Universities of Florence, Bonn and Paris IV-Sorbonne. Her dissertation, which she is currently revising for publication, provided - under the supervision of professor Arnaldo Bruni - the first critical edition with commentary of the poems of Benvenuto Cellini. Her primary field of expertise is the Italian literature of the Renaissance, with a specialization in Florentine culture in the age of Duke Cosimo the First (1537-1574). She is especially interested in the literary production of early modern painters and scuptors and in the intersections between literature and figurative arts. Another focus of her investigations concerns the consequences on sixteenth-century Italian writers of the great Reformation crisis. She presented some of the results of her Ph.D. research on Benvenuto Cellini in a series of papers (one of them in the Accademia della Crusca's journal Studi di Filologia Italiana), and during international lessons or conferences, such as the Vasari/500 symposium held at Harvard University in 2011.

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)

Bard Graduate Center

Bartolomeo Scappi's paper kitchen: food and knowledge in Renaissance Italy

2013-2014: Spring

Deborah L. Krohn teaches Italian Renaissance decorative arts and cultural history at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, in New York City, where she is an associate professor. She holds a BA and MA from Princeton University, and a PhD from Harvard University, and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy, as well as a fellowship from the American Association of University Women, among others. She has collaborated on several exhibitions at the Bard Graduate Center, including Salvaging the Past: French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013, co-curator and co-editor of the catalogue), Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (2009, co-curator and co-editor of the catalogue), and was also a contributor to the exhibition and catalogue of the 2008 Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her current research explores the history and reception of the first illustrated cookbook in Europe, Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570). She has published essays about Italian Renaissance art and patronage, the history of collecting, and culinary history.

Northwestern University

Chicago; Universita' di Pisa

Aby Warburg: A Philosphy of the Future

2004-2005

Davide Stimilli is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Pisa and in comparative literature from Yale University. He is the author of Fisionomia di Kafka (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001) and The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (Albany: SUNY Press, November 2004). He is the editor of a monographic issue of the Italian journal aut aut devoted to Aby Warburg (Aby Warburg. La dialettica dell'immagine, 321-322/2004), and of a forthcoming selection of Warburg's unpublished writings under the title Per monstra ad sphaeram: Selected Writings 1923-1925 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2005). At the Italian Academy he will be completing a book-length study of Warburg's work, which carries the provisional title Aby Warburg: A Philology of the Future and is meant to articulate the dialectic of philology and divination that is at the core of Warburg's methodology.

University of Parma (Italy)

Linking latent factors to functional subnetworks in the monkey motor cortex 

2026–2027: Fall 

I am a researcher in neuroscience studying how the brain controls actions in natural contexts. I trained in physics at the University of Parma, where I developed a strong interest in data analysis and complex systems. I then moved into neuroscience and completed my PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Parma, where I studied how single neurons in the macaque premotor cortex encode both executed and observed actions.

After my PhD, I held postdoctoral positions at the National Research Council of Italy, focusing on the analysis of intracranial EEG recordings in humans to investigate the neural basis of tactile awareness. I am currently a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Parma, where I apply machine learning and computational models to study how populations of neurons in the primate premotor cortex encode actions under naturalistic conditions, while the monkey moves freely in the environment.

Website: https://boninilab.unipr.it/it/members/davide-albertini/267/

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

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

Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia

Greek myths in cross-cultural translation: the case of Etruria

2014-2015: Fall and Spring

I received a PhD in Archaeology (Etruscan Studies) at the University of Rome La Sapienzain 2002, and taught Etruscan and Italic Epigraphy in the same university from 2006 to 2010, and later as a member of the Board of Teachers for the PhD in Linguistic History of Ancient Mediterranean at the IULM University of Milan. I am currently a socio corrispondente of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, a member of the Società Italiana di Storia delle Religioni, and a Margo Tytus Visiting Scholar Fellow at the University of Cincinnati (Summer 2014).
My research interests lie in the entire field of the history and culture of pre-Roman Italy, with special regard to issues of identity, culture-exchange and Greek and Roman acculturation. In particular, my project at the Italian academy focuses on ancient religion and mythology and in the changing cross-cultural relationships among them, seeking evidence of the agency of the Etruscan craftsmen and their patrons in the process of selection and adaptation of Greek myths into their own figural artistic representations.
In this field, along with a steady series of articles and papers in journals and edited volumes, I am author of the volume “Il dono votivo. Gli dei e il sacro nelle iscrizioni etrusche di culto,” (2009) and recently contributed to international books, such as “The Etruscan World” edited by J. Turfa (2013, with a chapter on the religious value of numbers and divisions in Etruria), “Handbook of Etruscology” edited by A. Naso (forthcoming, with a chapter on the Etruscan religion), and “The Role of Animals in ancient Myth and Religion,” edited by G. Casadio, A. Mastrocinque & P. Johnston (forthcoming, with a contribution on birds in Etruscan and Roman divination).
http://pont-ara.academia.edu/DanieleFedericoMaras

Università degli Studi di Catania

Beta-amyloid-induced memory loss: beneficial effect of drugs acting on the nitric oxide cascade

2006-2007

Puzzo is a neuroscientist who has contributed to the characterization of the mechanisms of learning in both normal conditions and during neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Puzzo received her M.D. from the University of Catania (Italy) where she graduated in 1999 (110/110 with honours). In 2002 she obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Biomedical Sciences at the University of Catania. She has also obtained a Degree in Acupuncture and she is attending a Gestalt Therapy School. She has focused her scientific interest on learning and memory, with particular attention to hippocampal synaptic plasticity. She started performing research at the Nathan Kline Institute (NYU School of Medicine, New York) in 2002 with Prof. O. Arancio. She determined that a signaling pathway initiated by nitric oxide is inactivated by beta-amyloid during synaptic plasticity and learning. Thanks to her experience in electrophysiology, immunocytochemistry and behaviour, she has started an independent research line in Italy in collaboration with Prof. S. Sapienza and Prof. A. Palmeri at the University of Catania. Her results have been communicated at several national and international meetings, with great enthusiasm from the neuroscience community, and published in international scientific journals. The fruitful collaboration with Prof. Arancio is continuing, so Dr. Puzzo has returned to work with him at Columbia University.
Dr. Puzzo combines her scientific skills with a great artistic talent. Graduated in music in 1993, she has performed piano concerts in Italy and abroad. Together with a percussionist of Arabic instruments, Giorgio Rizzo, she performs an original fusion of traditional Middle Eastern music with classical music. Her main artistic project consists in a composition of a lyric opera. As a fellow of the Italian Academy, she will focus on the beneficial effect of drugs acting on the nitric oxide cascade to counteract memory loss in Alzheimer's Disease and other neurodegenerative disorders characterized by cognitive impairment.

Università degli Studi di Torino

Why Are Labor Market Participation and Fertility Rates So Low in Italy?

2003-2004: Fall

Daniela Del Boca, Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison 1988, is a Professor of Economics at the University of Turin. She has been a Visiting Professor at New York University and an Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. She has published several books and articles in the area of Labor Economics and the Economics of the Family. Her articles have appeared in international journals, including The American Economic Review, The Journal of Human Resources, Labour, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, The Review of Economics of the Family, and The Journal of Population Economics. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Labour and The Review of Economics of the Family. She is currently a Fellow of the Center for European Studies (CES) at NYU and of the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), and is Director of the Center for Household Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD).

Universität Hamburg (Germany)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

A lost Mediterranean landscape: parklands and palaces of medieval Sicily

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Dana Katz is an art and architectural historian specializing in the material culture of the medieval Mediterranean. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto.

She was a Senior Research Fellow at Universität Hamburg’s German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded Center for Advanced Study, “RomanIslam - Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies,” in addition to holding a François Chevalier Fellowship at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS), Casa de Velázquez/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2022–23. Previously, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City in 2021–22. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History (HCMH) at the University of Haifa and held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supervised by the late Prof. Ronnie Ellenblum.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Medieval Academy of America (Olivia Remie Constable Award, 2021), the American Philosophical Society (Franklin Research Grant, 2023) and the Getty Research Institute (Library Research Grant, 2023). In the past, she has participated in international seminars of the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, funded by the Getty.

At the Italian Academy, Katz is completing a book on a historical landscape in the medieval Mediterranean: the royal parklands of the twelfth-century Norman kings of Sicily. The monograph considers the interplay of the three connected elements of landscape, architecture, and interfaith relations in a pre-modern hegemonic society. In addition to medieval Sicily, her research interests and publications encompass Islamic art and architecture, medieval archaeology, urban transformation of Mediterranean cities, Crusader art, and the modern formation of Islamic and medieval art collections.

Princeton University

Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind

2009-2010

Mellon New Directions Visiting Scholar

D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet magazine in Brooklyn, and a member of the faculty at Princeton University. His training is in the history and philosophy of science, and he is the author of four books, most recently Trying Leviathan (Princeton) which was awarded the 2008 New York City Book Award and the Hermalyn Prize for Urban History.

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).

Université Paris 1 Panthéon - Sorbonne

Support for the war-wounded in Italy: preserving testimony in buildings, monuments, and documents

2018-2019: Spring

I completed my Ph.D. in Modern History at Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the University of Milan in July 2012 (first grade honours). I have been teaching Modern History at the Department of Management, Labour and Social Studies of Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne University and at the University of Turin (Italy) since September 2014. In September 2017 I started teaching Disability Studies at Sciences-Po Paris. As a scholar, I have two main fields of specialisation. The research field I have been working on since my Ph.D. is the intellectual history of Modern Europe. I have in particular inquired on the relationships between ethics and politics in Modern Europe, the politics of education in modern France, the intellectual and cultural circulations in Modern Europe.

In 2016, I started working on a new project on the Social History of Disability as an associated researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Paris Descartes University. I have a substantial and increasing record of publication, including four books, ten peer-reviewed articles and seven book-chapters.
The research I will pursue at the Italian Academy focuses on Italian ex-servicemen of the Great War. It aims at providing an overall view of the physical legacy (architectural and documentary) relating to Italian veterans disabled in 1915-1918. The purpose is to restore to common knowledge the memory of a crucial page in the country’s history, one which has so far remained largely unknown. 

Web page: https://sorbonne-fr.academia.edu/CorinneDori

Università di Milano

Preacher, healer, founder, and inquisitor: the image and cult of St. Peter Martyr

2012-2013: Fall

Corinna T. Gallori graduated from the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy), and holds a PhD in Art History (2008) from the same university. Since 2009 she has been at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, firstly as a short-time post-doctorate fellow (Kurzzeitstipendiatin) of Prof. Alessandro Nova's directorate, and then as a researcher collaborating on the project "Imágenes en vuelo". Europa, Mexiko und die Globalisierung der Bilder in der Frühen Neuzeit (http://www.khi.fi.it/forschung/projekte/projekte/projekt10/index.html) of Prof. Dr. Gerhard Wolf's directorate.
Corinna's field of research focuses on Christian iconography and includes studies of the Mass of St. Gregory in Italy (15th to 16th century), and of the imaging of the Dominican saints Peter Martyr and Albert the Great in the 15th century. For the project "Imágenes en vuelo" she also researched the use of European prints as iconographic sources in Mexican featherwork, and the collecting of such feather mosaics in Italy.
Corinna is the author of several publications including, but not limited to, "Una mostra d'arte lignea e qualche novità sui rilievi Stroganoff," Rassegna di studi e di notizie, 31-34, 2007/08 (2008), pp. 121-52; 'Il trittico del Diözesanmuseum di Vienna,' Arte lombarda, 158-159, 2010, pp. 24-38; and the monograph Il monogramma dei Nomi di Gesù e Maria: storia di un'iconografia tra scrittura e immagine (Asola, 2012).

Università di Genova

Mathematical monsters: the essential tension between normal and pathological in modern mathematics

2010-2011: Spring

Claudio Bartocci (Ph.D. in mathematics, University of Warwick, UK, 1993) is associate professor at the University of Genova, where he teaches mathematical physics and history of mathematics. He has had visiting positions at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the UniversitÉ de Paris VII, the University of Philadelphia, and the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has authored some 40 refereed papers (mostly in mathematical physics and differential and algebraic geometry), 2 research monographs, and several essays on the history of mathematical thought, on the relations between mathematics and literature, and on various issues in philosophy of science. Among his more recent publications: "Fourier-Mukai and Nahm transforms in geometry and mathematical physics" (co-authors: U. Bruzzo and D. Hernández RuipÉrez, Birkhäuser 2009), "Vite matematiche" (co-authsor: R. Betti, A. Guerraggio, R. Lucchetti, Springer 2007; English translation forthcoming), "Racconti matematici" (Einaudi 2006); he is the coeditor, together with P. Odifreddi, of "La matematica" (Einaudi). He is presently completing a book, "Mostri matematici" (Cortina Editore, Milano), about the conceptual development of 19th / early 20th century mathematics, with special emphasis on the role of pathological examples. At the Italian Academy he will investigate the philosophical implications of this research work.

The Warburg Institute, University of London School of Advanced Study (UK)

The story of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Claudia Wedepohl is an art historian with a degree in Italian literature. She joined the staff of the Warburg Institute in 2000 and has been the Institute’s archivist since 2006.

Educated at the Universities of Göttingen and Hamburg, she has held fellowships at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin and the Research Centre Morphomata at the University of Cologne.

Her publications focus on fifteenth-century Italian art and architecture, and on the genesis of Warburg’s ideas, key terms and concepts; they include In den glänzenden Reichen des ewigen Himmels. Cappella del Perdono und Tempietto delle Muse im Herzogpalast von Urbino (2009), The Muses and Their Afterlife in Post-Classical Europe, ed. by Kathleen W. Christian, Clare E. L. Guest and Claudia Wedepohl (2014), Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gespräch. Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne (with Horst Bredekamp, 2015) and Aby Warburg 150. Work, Legacy, Promise, ed. by David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (2024).

Claudia is also co-editor of Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften series (De Gruyter, Berlin).

More information: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/people/claudia-wedepohl

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

Københavns Universitet

The body’s eloquence: moving, acting, and dancing on the operatic stage in Florence (1630–1700)

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Christine Jeanneret is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on Italian music of the Renaissance and Baroque, with a particular interest in performance practices and the staging of early music, the body on stage, as well as the cultural transmission of repertoires. She published one book on the manuscript sources of Frescobaldi’s music, "L’Œuvre en filigrane" (Olschki, 2009), she co-edited three volumes of the Frescobaldi’s Complete Works for Suvini-Zerboni, and has published articles on keyboard music, the Roman cantata, the late madrigal, and opera and gender studies. She is an editor for the new, dynamic edition of Marenzio's Secular Works (MODE) and is currently preparing the critical edition of Cavalli's "Ipermestra" for Bärenreiter. 

Web page: http://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk/ansatte/?pure=da/persons/502090

University College London

The flesh of images: a social history of serial expressive crucifixes in early modern Italy (1550–1650)

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Chiara Franceschini is currently a Teaching Fellow in Renaissance Studies at UCL. She previously worked at the Warburg Institute as a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and an Academic Assistant in the Photographic Collection. She studied archaeology, Renaissance art and early modern history in Pisa, Florence and London, receiving her PhD in 2008 from the Scuola Normale Superiore. Her forthcoming book on notions of limbo (Il limbo. Storia di un’immagine) explores relations between images of the afterlife, belief and the social history of theology. Her publications in the fields of Renaissance art, visual culture and European history, 1300-1650, include “The Nudes in Limbo: Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo Reconsidered” (The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes), recipient of I Tatti Prize for Best Essay in 2011. She is currently working on the status and the normativity of Renaissance and early modern sacred images in connection with the limits of hyperrealistic art, and on art historiography and theory. She co-edited a special issue “Classifying content: Photographic collections and theories of thematic ordering” of Visual Resources (2014).

Web page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/selcs/people/italian-staff/chiara-franceschini

Università degli Studi di Milano

Theatre, simulation, and mirror neurons

2009-2010: Spring

Chiara Cappelletto is currently Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan from which she holds a Ph.D in Philosophy in 2003 (The synoptic view. Essay on nature of form in Ludwig Wittgenstein's thought).
In 2001 she received a grant "for continuing education of young excellent students" at the University of Milan. She spent a year at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, invited by George Didi-Huberman to take part in his seminar and to the workshop "Morphologies", focusing on link between Aesthetics and Natural Sciences. In 2003 she took her Diplôme d'Études Approfondies at EHESS on the concept of Darstellung in Aby Warburg and Ludwig Wittgenstein (supervisor Fernando Gil).
In 2004, her book Il rito delle pulci. Wittgenstein morfologo [The flea's rite. On Wittgenstein's Morphology] obtained the ninth Castiglioncello Philosophy Award (president of jury Paolo Rossi, section "Young scholars, Antonella Musu").
In 2005/2006 she held an one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Philosophy Dept. of the University of Milan (Aesthetics and Morphology in Wittgenstein. Origins and prospects). Her work focussed on the Wittgensteinian development of Goethe's morphological paradigm, relating sciences with culture.
Since 2006, her research deals with the study of empathy and fiction in performing arts, taking in account the new perspectives in neuroaesthetics. Her most recent book is then devoted to Neuroestetica. L'arte del cervello [Neuroaesthetics. Brain's Art] (2009).
She is currently developing theatrical researches. She has recently edited and prefaced Scena e dramma [Stage and Drama] by Waldemar Conrad and she is the author of several essays on aesthetics of theatre.

Università del Piemonte Orientale

Litigants' duty to disclose: a forgotten example of the Italian legal heritage

2007-2008

Chiara Besso is Full Professor of Law at University of Piemonte Orientale in Italy. Member of the Board of the Review "Giurisprudenza Italiana", of the Doctoral school "European Law, History and Law Systems", of the Doctorate on "Foundations of the European Law and Comparative Method", and of the "Scuola di specializzazione per le professioni legali" (Universities of Torino and Piemonte Orientale), she has been Visiting Fellow at the London Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and at the University College of Oxford.
Her areas of research are law of evidence, discovery, reforms of civil procedure, and irregularity of acts.
She is the author of several articles on civil procedure topics (above all civil procedure reforms, taking of evidence, probability and judicial reasoning), and two books on pre-action discovery and procedural formalism (La prova prima del processo; 2004, La sentenza civile inesistente, 1997).
At the Italian Academy, she will be exploring the evolution of the litigants' duty to discover information. She will focus on the origins of the Anglo-American discovery, starting from its antecedent in Roman-canon law methods, as a tool to understand the present differences between the Anglo-American and the European continental attitudes to the ascertainment of truth and to explore the chances to build a notion of the duty to discover acceptable to both civil law and common law countries.

University of Colorado Boulder (USA)

All the kings of the Mediterranean: the papacy and the conquest of North Africa, 1450–1620

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Céline Dauverd is a scholar of the political and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, with an emphasis on the histories of empire and religion in the Mediterranean world. Her work focuses on the socio-cultural relations between Italy, Spain, North Africa, and Türkiye c. 1440–1640. After obtaining her PhD in early modern European history at UCLA, she joined the University of Colorado Boulder where she is an Associate Professor of Mediterranean History. She is the author of three books published by Cambridge University Press: Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2015), Church and State in Spanish Italy (2020), and Colonialism and Resistance in Early Modern Europe (2024). She is currently guest editing a volume on the Spanish Empire for Mediterranean Studies (Penn State).

At the Italian Academy, she is crafting a new book, All the Kings of the Mediterranean: The Role of the Renaissance Papacy in the North African Conquest, 1450–1620, assessing the papacy’s temporal jurisdiction over the Iberian conquest of North Africa. By gauging relations between Muslim and Christian rulers through the prism of the popes’ pursuit of imperial power, All the Kings explores the popes’ unique involvement in the Maghrebi conquest via the notion of oikoumene or “inhabited world.” This book illustrates how the papacy redefined its imperium to claim sovereignty over the whole Mediterranean world, both Christian and Muslim, seeking leadership over all confessions.

In recent years, Dauverd has won fellowships from the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies at Casa de Velázquez, Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder, Council of American Overseas Research Center (Istanbul, Rome, Tangiers), European University Institute in Florence, Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard University I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance in Florence, Humanities Research Institute at the University of California Irvine, and the Mellon Foundation at the Huntington Library. 

Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)

Performing Arts Systems Transmission (PAST): Michel Saint-Denis’ acting training as a case study in Europe and the USA

2023–2024: Fall

Cecilia Carponi is a theatre historian, professor at the Accademia Internazionale di Teatro, and teaching assistant at the Sapienza University in Rome, where she earned her PhD in 2018, in co-tutorship with the Sorbonne Nouvelle University of Paris, École doctorale Arts & Média. In 2019–2020, she had a one-year Post-doc Position at Sapienza University of Rome (Project: “Storia documentaria del teatro italiano”).

Her research has focused on the applied theatre and community theatre phenomena (La malattia che cura il teatro, Dino Audino 2020, co-ed. Andrea Porcheddu; Matera Città Aperta, Cue Press 2021; Incroci. Esperienze di teatro per una comunità interculturale, un progetto di Teatro Magro, Asinitas, Progetto Amunì/Babel, Cue Press 2022, co-ed. Andrea Porcheddu). 

Her current studies concern chiefly the art of acting and actors’ trainings (L’arte e il mestiere. Michel Saint-Denis e la formazione tecnica dell’interprete, Bulzoni 2023).

At the Italian Academy she will be focusing on the transmission of performing arts knowledge, in order to link current teaching practices to the original acting pedagogies from which they derive, with a historical-philological perspective. The case study she will consider represents a crucial link among different theatre cultures in the 20th Century: the position as “artistic advisor” and “consultant director” assigned to Michel Saint-Denis (1897–1971), born and trained in Europe (in France), in the foundation of America’s Juilliard School Drama Division. Her research project will analyze the consequences in acting training techniques caused by the interaction among opposite theatre cultures: Jacques Copeau’s research on body expression, Kostantin Stanislavsky’s work on psychotechnical approach, and the 1960s American Method.

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.

Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne University (France) 

History of genetics and its social implications

2026–2027: Spring

Carole Reynaud-Paligot is a historian. After studying political science, she devoted her early research to the politicization of the artistic and literary avant-gardes (anarchism, neo-impressionism, and surrealism). Then, she carried out a detailed investigation into the racial culture that had spread widely in France (19th–20th centuries) and throughout Western societies.

She has published several books including: Parcours politique des surréalistes 1919–1969 (CNRS éditions, 1994, 2025), La République raciale. Une histoire 1860–1940 (2021 PUF Quadrige), De l’identité nationale. Science, race et politique en Europe et aux Etats-Unis (PUF, 2011), L’Ecole aux colonies entre racialisation et mission civilisatrice (Champ Vallon, 2020).

With geneticist Evelyne Heyer, she was scientific co-curator of the exhibition “Nous et les Autres. From prejudice to racism” at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, which is still touring France and abroad. With artist Ismaël Méziane, they published a graphic novel Comment devient-on raciste? (Casterman).

Website: centrehistoire19esiecle.pantheonsorbonne.fr/carole-reynaud-paligot

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

Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris

Relativism in democracy: Catholic political thought and the role of truth in politics

2013-2014: Fall

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Conservatorio di Musica

Piacenza

Cognitive, Behavioral and Neurophysiological Responses to Musical Listening

2002-2003: Spring

Carlo Alessandro Landini, born in Milan (1954), graduated in 1978 with full marks in Composition and the Piano, both in Italy and France. He perfected his composition style between 1979 and 1981 in Paris, where he attended the renowned CNSM (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique), and was unanimously awarded the Premier Prix. He taught Music at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) from 1981 to 1983; he now holds the teaching chair in Composition at the "G. Nicolini" Conservatory in Piacenza. Landini, who is also a journalist, contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines and has published a wide array of essays on Music, Aesthetics and Psychology, including: Phenomenology of Ecstasy (1982); Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio (1999).

Università di Pisa

Lo stile come fattore di identità culturale e di memoria nell'arte e nella società contemporanea

2003-2004

Carla Benedetti is Professor of Italian Contemporary Literature at the University of Pisa, and recurrent Visiting Professor of Italian at New York University. Her books include "La soggettivita' nel racconto. Proust e Svevo"(1984), "Una trappola di parole. Lettura del 'Pasticciaccio'" (1987) [on Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana], "Modi di attribuzione. Filosofia e teoria dei sistemi," co-authored (1989), and more recently, "Pasolini contro Calvino. Per una letteratura impura" (1998), "L'ombra lunga dell'autore. Indagine su una figura cancellata" (1999, soon to be published by Cornell University Press) and "Il tradimento dei critici" (2002). Professor Benedetti has also written numerous articles and contributes regularly to the Italian edition of the "New York Review of Books" and to the culture section of the Italian magazine, "L'Espresso."

University of Virginia

Giuliano da Sangallo and the ruins of Rome

2015-2016: Fall

Cammy Brothers is Valmarana Associate Professor and Director of the Venice Program at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is the author of Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of ArchitectureYale U.P., 2008), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Prize from The College Art Association and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her research interests and publications focus on relations between architecture and painting, architectural drawing, artistic exchange around the Mediterranean, and the history of Mediterranean cities. 

Web page: http://www.arch.virginia.edu/people/directory/cammy-brothers

Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (UMR7323 du CNRS – UFR Université François-Rabelais de Tours)

Ippolito I d’Este’s music room: reconstructing a lost collection

2016-2017: Fall

Camilla Cavicchi is a musicologist associated with the Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours (France). In 2006, she was awarded a doctorate in musicology and musical heritage by the Università di Bologna, with a thesis on the French composer Maistre Jhan (1512–1538). In 2007 she began work on her CNRS post-doctorate on Renaissance singers prosopography at the Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance. She taught organology at the Università di Bologna and history of music at the Université de Montpellier. She takes a multidisciplinary approach to researching the history of music in Renaissance Europe and the Mediterranean; drawing from archives, prosopography, music iconography, organology and ethnomusicology, and focussing on three major fields: court music, regional and popular traditions. She has published on the subjects of musical iconography, organology, the history of musical institutions in the Renaissance, and orally transmitted musical repertoires, especially those of barbers and singers of tales.

Web page: https://univ-tours.academia.edu/CamillaCavicchi

Columbia University

Understanding a novel anticipatory task-related brain imaging signal

2013-2014: Spring

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).

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck Institut; Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design

Struggle for democracy or culture of dominance? The agora in postwar architectural discourse

2018-2019: Spring

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Brigitte Sölch is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture/Design History at Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design as well as Associate Member of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence - Max-Planck-Institute, where she served till 2018 as academic assistant and co-project leader of "Ethics and Architecture" and "Piazza e monumento". She is an art and architectural historian with a Habilitation (Humboldt University in Berlin) for the "forum" on architectural, aesthetic and sociopolitical ideas between the Renaissance and the present and an award-winning Dissertation on the beginning of public museums in Rome in the early 18th century. She published articles on the struggle for democracy, the piazza as western metaphor, the emotive impact of institutional architecture and the human body in architecture. As fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University NY in 2019 she will be studying "The Agora in Postwar Architectural Discourse". The focus of her research is on concepts and broader understanding of urban public space, politics and the history of ideas. Brigitte pursued her research interests by working in museums, universities, and international research institutes.

St. Mary's College of Maryland

Kabbalistic notions of time in Italian Renaissance thought

2011-2012: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Brian Ogren is a scholar of religion with a concentration on Jewish thought in the Italian Renaissance. He was raised in California, was educated in the United States and in Israel, and has spent extensive periods of time studying in Europe. Similar to his own personal trajectories between worlds, his intellectual concentration has been upon the flow and reception of ideas among diverse intellectual communities. He has examined issues of change and continuity in the thought of learned Jews and Christians, including their modes of argumentation as a means of shaping identity. He is attracted to themes of center and margin, interior and exterior, and differing notions of time, space, and self. As a fellow at the Italian Academy, Brian will be exploring kabbalistic concepts of cyclical time in Italian Renaissance thought. This is an ongoing project that examines the construction of history, as well as the usage of eschatology, for polemical purposes related to differing ideas of "messianism."

Columbia University

Waves, Rhythms and Oscillations: the pacemaker molecules that enable our body to keep the beat

2005-2006

Bina Santoro completed her studies at the University of Rome, where she was trained as a molecular biologist and received a PhD in Evolutionary Biology. She has since specialized in the study of electrical signaling in the nervous system and the molecules responsible for it, namely ion channels. Her interests particularly concern a class of ion channels responsible for the generation of oscillatory, rhythmic electrical activity in the brain, as well as in the heart (pacemaker channels). She first identified the family of genes that encode pacemaker channels, and is still involved in the study of their molecular expression pattern and cellular organization, a field in which she is considered one of the leading experts. Her work is aimed both at understanding basic mechanisms of brain function, with a specific focus on the neural substrates for learning and cognition, as well as at understanding diseases due to electrical disturbances, including epilepsy and cardiac arrhythmias. Bina Santoro is an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, where she works in collaboration with a group of biophysicists, electrophysiologists and geneticists interested in ion channel function.

Columbia University

The female narcissus: Renaissance women's writing technologies

2008-2009

Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi specializes in Comparative Renaissance literature; her particular interests lie in book history, early modern drama, and women’s cultural production from 1450-1650. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003, with a dissertation on the typography of the early modern printed play. From 2004 to 2007, she was a Haarlow-Cotsen Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University and an Associate Fellow in 2007-2008. She is currently Assistant Professor of Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University. 

Her research explores the ways in which visual media, specifically letterforms and ink, were used to constitute and express national, corporeal, racial, and other forms of identity on the Renaissance page--Black’ or ‘Gothic’ lettering as pan-Germanic affiliation, Roman Capitals as stone epigraphy, rubrication (red ink) as simulated blood. Her most recent publications include essays on “counterfeit” Italian play texts and on Milton’s sanguineous Eikonoklastes forthcoming in Renaissance Drama (2009) and The Book in History, the Book as History (2010). 

At the Italian Academy, she will be investigating the wide range of graphic technologies, from painted inscriptions to lettered samplers to printed colophons, which advertise Renaissance women as manual makers of letters. In some cases, these writing systems function as a demonstration of alphabetical literacy, in others as a manifestation of physical and pedagogical self-mastery, in yet others as proof of participation in changing textual markets. A de facto ut pittura poesis results from their combined presence, in which the literary and artistic theories of Alberti, Dolce, and Puttenham, among others, confront the difference of gendered production. Earlier stages of the project appeared as “’you sow, Ile read’: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers” (Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 2007) and “Alphabetical Positions: Engendering Letters in Early Modern Europe” (Critical Survey, 14.1, 2002).

Columbia University

Consequences of prenatal nicotine exposure on nicotine and cocaine addiction during adolescence

2013-2014: Fall and Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Bettina Drisaldi is an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. She studied Biological Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy, where she also obtained her PhD in Genetics. In 1998 she was awarded a Fullbright fellowship to study Neurobiology in the USA. After spending three years at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, where she worked in the laboratory of David A. Harris on the molecular characteristics of prion proteins, in 2001 she moved to University of Toronto, to work as a postdoctorsal fellow in the laboratory of David Westaway at the Centre for Research in Neurodenerative Diseases. 

After accepting a position in the Laboratory of Eric Kandel she is now studying the consequences of prenatal nicotine exposure on nicotine and cocaine addiction during adolescence and adult life. 

Moreover, since addiction is considered to arise from a maladaptive persistent associative memory of a highly pleasurable experience, she is also working on the analysis of the molecular putative role in cocaine addiction of a protein associated to the maintenance and consolidation of hippocampal long-term memories.

Università di Siena

The Art Criticism of Franz Boas and Gladys A. Reichard (1897-1933)

2005-2006

After studies at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' (Italy), Benedetta Cestelli Guidi received her MA in 1994 at the Warburg Institute, London: both her researches dealt with cultural and visual politics in Renaissance Italy (Venice and Ferrara). A portion of her part time research project dealt with the materials (both written and figurative) that Aby Warburg collected during his 'fieldtrip' during his American journey (1895-1896). From this research came two publications: Warburg's photographs, published in the English-German volume 'Photographs at the Frontier. Aby Warburg in America 1895-1896' co-edited by Cestelli Guidi and Nicholas Mann (Merrell Holberton and The Warburg Institute, London, 1998), and the first comprehensive study of Warburg's Pueblo collection, published in the French volume 'Le Rituel du Serpent. Art et Anthropologie' (Macula, Paris 2003). She co-organized the international conference on the legacy of Aby Warburg including panels on aesthetics, art history and anthropology (Rome, 2001). The collected works of the conference are published under the title 'Lo sguardo di Giano. Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria'; papers in the collection which concern anthropology were also edited by Cestelli Guidi (Nino Aragno, Torino 2005).
In her Ph.D. she conducts a comparative study between Aby Warburg's Kulturwissenschaft and Franz Boas's research on cultural anthropology as seen in their respective approaches to museum display and the visual arts (University of Siena, Italy, 2005).
Her research at the Italian Academy focuses on Boas and Reichard's framework for art criticism with respect to native art. Boas and Reichard's methodologies concerning native art are compared to European art criticism developed in the 19th and 20th centuries in German speaking countries (G.Semper; A.Riegl; H.Wolfflin; A.Warburg) in order to prove if, and to what extent, the two disciplines - anthropology and art history - have had an influence in methods and analysis.

Sapienza – Università di Roma

Portraits, behaviors and inclusion: the construction of cultural and biological heritage through images during the 17th and 18th centuries

2016-2017: Fall

Dr. Benedetta Borello earned her PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) (2000) [Thesis title: Du patriciat urbain à la Chaire de Saint Pierre: les Pamphiljs du XV au XVIII siècle], and her PhD at the Università di Napoli L’Orientale (2000) [Thesis title: La socialità aristocratica a Roma: reti di relazioni femminili fuori e dentro la famiglia]. Currently, she is a research fellow at the Department of History of «La Sapienza» Università di Roma and she teaches Early Modern and Modern History at the Department of Humanities at the Università dell’Aquila.The main areas of her research activity are history of the family and gender history, history of the élites, network analysis and public opinion, especially in the early modern period. She has been a Research Fellow, ENBacH – European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage, a project promoted and economically supported by the European Commission through the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) which concerned and involved a network of 8 universities located in 6 different European countries (Universitat de Barcelona, Technische Universität, Dresden, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris, Università di Roma «La Sapienza», Università di Teramo, Uniwersytet Warszawski, and Universität Wien). For this project she worked on «Spaces, publics and “public spheres” in baroque Rome». The problem of the definition of “public” and “public sphere” is put at the intersection between the history of publication, urban history, social and cultural history. To some extent, it is the space (and the place) that imposes norms to men and women who use the place to act as political subjects. By means of some examples, she entered the literary milieu of baroque Rome, showing its mechanisms of publication and censorship and, by means of the interactive map of Rome on the EnBACH website, she showed the spaces where political communication and religious controversy took place. In 2006 she was also Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She is the author of Trame sovrapposte. La socialità aristocratica e le reti di relazioni femminili a Roma (XVII-XVIII secolo), (Naples, 2003), and Il posto di ciascuno. Fratelli, sorelle e fratellanze (XVI-XIX secolo) (Rome, 2016), and, with Renata Ago, she is the editor of Famiglie. Circolazione di beni, circuiti di affetti in età moderna (Rome, 2008) and the editor of Pubblico e pubblici di Antico Regime (Pisa, 2009). During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will be working on a book project dedicated to “Portraits, Behaviour and Inclusion. The Construction of Cultural and Biological Heritage through Images (Rome, 17th and 18th Centuries).” The project will consider the figures portrayed in their physical (the family home or the monastery) and historical (Rome in the 17th century) contexts and the visual effect achieved by the images. 

Web page: https://uniroma.academia.edu/BenedettaBorello

Bar-Ilan University

Israel

'Prima e seconda prattica' of settecento music theory

2006-2007

Bella Brover-Lubovsky received her B.A. and M.A. in musicology in Russia, and her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2001). Her principal research interests include eighteenth-century harmonic theories; the epistemological and cultural roots of tonality; early and mid-eighteenth century instrumental music; and Russian music. She has been published articles in various scholarly journals and presented papers at international conferences and symposiums. Her book "Estro armonico" on Vivaldi's tonality is soon to be published by the Indiana University Press.
Brover-Lubovsky has been a recipient of the Vigevani Postdoctoral prize for a study in Italy (2003), and a Newberry Library fellowship for individual research (2005). She spent a 2003-04 as a postdoctoral fellow and a visiting assistant professor at the School of Music, University of Illinois. She has been a Research fellow and lecturer at the Musicology Department, Hebrew University from 2001-2006; a lecturer at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music and Dance since 1995, and an Assistant Professor at the Music Department, Bar-Ilan University, since 2005.
While at Columbia, she will further her current research towards a study of theoretical and philological sources into the concepts of organization of tonal space and systematization of pitch phenomena in Italian music of the "long eighteenth century," viewed against the intellectual and artistic background of the time.

Sapienza Università di Roma

Structure and function of the SRD5A enzyme family: new targets for schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders

2015-2016: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Beatrice Vallone, PhD, is a Professor of Biochemistry at La Sapienza Università di Roma and currently a Visiting Professor in the Dept. of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics of Columbia University. Dr. Vallone investigates the structure of proteins to understand their role in human physiology and pathology, in order to set the basis for innovative therapies.
Highlights of her career include having determined the structure of neuroglobin, a protein that plays a crucial role in neuronal protection, and having made substantial contribution to the field of protein engineering for creating blood substitutes and producing new antibiotics.
As a fellow of the Italian Academy she will study testosterone alpha dehydrogenases, a family of membrane-embedded enzymes involved in the production of neurosteroids and in steroid activation. These are promising targets in psychiatry and oncology and an understanding of their structure will help in the design of novel drugs for severely debilitating pathologies.

Web page: https://vallonelab.it/people/

Universiteit Maastricht (The Netherlands)

The body inside out

2024–2025: Fall 

Beatrice de Gelder is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and a member of the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (M-BIC). Prior to her current assignments, she was a Senior Scientist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard University. She received an MA in Philosophy, an MA in Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Philosophy from Louvain University in Belgium. Her current research focuses on face and body recognition and, recently, on the neuroscience of art. She has authored or co-authored four professional books including her book on Emotions and the Body, Oxford University Press (2016). Popular contributions include an invited article in Scientific American expanding on the broad impact of her work on unconscious vision (2010, updated in 2017); in July 2011, Discovery Channel Science covered her work on nonconscious vision in the program “Through the Wormhole.” She coordinated various EC grants in FP6 and FP7 and is a partner in two H2020 consortia. She was the recipient of an ERC grant in 2012 and co-recipient of an ERC Synergy grant in 2019. Extensive documentation at www.beatricedegelder.com.

Website: www.beatricedegelder.com

Universiteit Maastricht

Emotion and the brain

2016-2017: Spring

Beatrice de Gelder is Professor of Social and Affective Neuroscience at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Her main areas of expertise are visual and audio-visual affective processes related to the perception of faces and bodies as well as auditory affective signals. She has extensive experience in designing and executing behavioral, functional and anatomical imaging studies, both in healthy and diseased populations, and has participated in funded research involving populations from diverse cultural backgrounds. Her current research focuses on face and body recognition and, recently, the neuroscience of art. She is currently serving as Editor in Chief of Frontiers of Emotion Science and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Psychopathology. In 2012, she was awarded an advanced European Research Council (ERC) scientific grant for the study of cultural differences in emotional body expression. In addition to Maastricht University, she holds appointments at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and University College London (UCL). Her book on “Emotions and the Body” has recently been published by Oxford University Press.

Versailles Centre for Baroque Music (CMBV; France)

The eloquent body: colors, gesture, vocality, and role shaping in early Italian opera

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Barbara Nestola is a musicologist and a theater historian. She has been the director of the research department of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (CMBV) since 2019. Her research focuses on musical transfers between Italy and France; on the performance practice of 17th century Italian opera; and on the interweaving of theatrical practices in French spoken and musical theater under the Ancien Régime. She is a member of the Francesco Cavalli and 17th Century Venetian Opera study group of the IMS (dir. E. Rosand), which is publishing the operas of Cavalli with Bärenreiter. She co-directed with E. De Luca the project ThéPARis. Les théâtres parisiens sous l’Ancien Régime (2019–2024), bringing together more than thirty researchers in musicology, literature, dance, theater, and art history.

She authored L’air italien sur la scene des théâtres parisiens (1687–⁠1715). Répertoire, pratiques, interprètes (Brepols, 2020) and co-edited The Fashioning of French Opera (1672–⁠1791): Identity, Production, Networks (Brepols, 2023) in collaboration with B. Dratwicki, J. Dubruque, and T. Leconte. With E. De Luca, she directed two special issues of academic journals: Les théâtres parisiens sous l’Ancien Régime. Parcours transversaux, Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 289/1 (2021) and Théâtres à recette et spectacles non payants (1661–⁠1797) : Créations, circulations, transversalité, Littératures classiques N° 113 (2024).

A specialist in the declamation of sung Italian, she leads vocal masterclasses and takes part in opera productions. She regularly collaborates as a scientific advisor with professional performers in concerts, recitals, opera productions, and audiovisual recordings.

More information: https://cesr.cnrs.fr/membre/nestola-barbara/

CUNY: The City College and Graduate Center

From arcana imperii to statistics: political information and science in the age of enlightenment

2014-2015: Fall

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

The aesthetic life of prestige status

2013-2014: Fall

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Subway design: Modernism from Milan to New York (1964–1972) 

2018-2019: Fall

Barbara Carnevali is associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she holds a a chair in “social aesthetics”. She studied philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and has been a fellow of the Fulbright Foundation at the University of Chicago (2003-2004), of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris (2011-2012) and of the Italian Academy (fall 2013).

She works on issues at the intersection between social philosophy and aesthetics. Her publications include the books Romantisme et reconnaissance. Figures de la conscience chez Rousseau (Droz: Geneva, 2012) and Le apparenze sociali (Social Appearances, Bologna: Il Mulino 2012, new English version forthcoming by Columbia University Press). She has contributed to various international journals such as Annales, Critique, Diogenes, WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, and she is member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Philosophy. 

During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will work on a new book on civic design and the aesthetic dimension of public space. 

Web page: https://www.ehess.fr/fr/personne/barbara-carnevali

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.

https://music.indiana.edu/faculty/current/smith-ayana.html

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.

Columbia University (U.S.A.)

Cognitive economics of the habitus

2020-2021: Spring

Dr. Arthur Prat-Carrabin is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Cognition and Decision Lab of the Economics department at Columbia University. Dr. Prat-Carrabin is interested in the cognitive mechanisms by which the human brain constructs internal representations of external variables, and in how these mechanisms impact behavior and decision-making. A first axis of his work focuses on inference and the formation of beliefs about uncertain information, while a second axis relates to problems of perception and encoding of external stimuli. Dr. Prat-Carrabin aims at providing theoretical accounts of behavior that are both biologically plausible and grounded in healthy computational principles. His work complements theoretical investigations with behavioral experiments.

Dr. Prat-Carrabin studied at École Polytechnique, in Paris, France, and obtained his PhD at the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm, also in Paris. He joined the Cognition and Decision Lab in early 2018.

Università di Milano

Dreams: an intersection of anthropology, neuroscience, and art

2015-2016: Fall

Arianna Cecconi received her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2008 under the joint supervision of the Università di Milano Bicocca and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and is the author of L'Acqua della paura (Mondadori 2003) and  I sogni vengono da fuori (Ed.It 2012). Currently, she teaches Cultural Anthropology at the Università di Milano and is an affiliated researcher at the Idemec (Université d'Aix-Marseille). The main topics of her ethnographic work to date comprise dreams, rituals, memory, violence, and local reconciliation processes. Arianna Cecconi has conducted ethnographic studies focused on these themes in different field sites: the Peruvian Andes, Spain, France, and Italy.

Publication:
2016  « La memoria de los que estaban y de los que no estaban: sueños y visiones en la España contemporánea» in Recostruyendo Memorias en el Triangulo Atlantico, Gunther Dietz & Christiane Stallaert (eds.), Xalapa Edition, Mexico [Forthcoming].

Web page: https://unicatt.academia.edu/ariannacecconi

Università degli Studi della Tuscia (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

The astro-mathematical education of the medieval architect

2024–2025: Fall

Arianna Carannante is an architect and architectural historian. In 2021 she earned a joint Ph.D. in History of Architecture at Sapienza Università di Roma and in History of Art at Sorbonne Université.

She was a researcher at the Centre André-Chastel (Paris) in 2019 and 2020. In 2019, she won the mobility funding grant (Bando Vinci) from the Università Italo-Francese (UFI-UIF).

She has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor since 2022 at the Università della Tuscia and since 2023 at Sapienza Università di Roma.

She was a research fellow (2020–2022) at the Politecnico di Torino on an interdisciplinary and international project, “Digital atlas of municipal palaces and places of community power in the Mediterranean Middle Ages.”

From July 2023 she has been working as a post-doctoral research fellow at Sapienza. In 2023 she won a prize from the Università Italo-Francese (UFI-UIF) for her Ph.D. thesis, “The royal building site of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Lucera and the relationship with ecclesiastical architecture in the Kingdom of Naples.”

From October 2023, she has been involved in the activity of the research group “CIVICARC – Building Civic Identities. Towards an Atlas of Communal Palaces in Italian Urban History (12th–20th Centuries)” (Italian PRIN 2022).

Her research interests focus on Romanesque architecture in Apulia, and on Angevine and mendicant patronage in Southern Italian architecture in the Middle Ages. In recent years she has been working on medieval communal palaces and on the relationship between architecture and urban space in central and southern Italy. On these topics she has participated in national and international conferences. Over the years she has published papers regarding her research; among her recent books is La cattedrale di Lucera e l'architettura angioina del primo Trecento (Rome: Viella, 2023).

Website: https://uniroma1.academia.edu/AriannaCarannante

European University Institute - Florence

Byzantine and Italian travel books in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

2010-2011: Spring

Anthony (Tony) Molho is Professor of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, having before taught (from 1966 to 2000) at Brown University, from which he retired as the David Herlihy University Professor Emeritus. His scholarly interests encompass the history of Italy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, with special emphasis on the history of Florence in the Renaissance; the Mediterranean world in the age of the great empires (from the fifteenth century to the rise of the national states in the early nineteenth century), with a focus on the transcultural commercial networks, especially in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In recent years he has been drawn to the study of the histories of those European scholars, mostly Jews, who were forced to leave their homes in the 1930s, to settle in the United States. Tony Molho's CV is available here; a list of his publications can be found here. In 2010, he was awarded the Galileo Galilei Prize.

ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Portugal)

Popular ecologies in southern Europe: a bottom-up approach to socio-environmental change

2024–2025: Spring

Antonio Maria Pusceddu is a senior researcher at the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), University Institute of Lisbon. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Siena. Before moving to Portugal, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari and at the University of Barcelona. He has conducted extensive field research in Greece, Albania, Italy, and most recently in Portugal, investigating issues of power and inequality through the lenses of borders, ethnicity, crisis and social reproduction. His current comparative project explores the relationships between environment and society in industrial regions of Italy and Portugal. Combining a social reproduction framework with a political ecology approach, the research interrogates the relevance of “popular ecologies” to develop a bottom-up perspective to socio-environmental change.

Università di Siena

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Transcranial magnetic stimulation for severe Tourette's Syndrome

2008-2009: Fall and Spring

Antonio Mantovani, MD, PhD, completed his medical training at Rome University and his psychiatry training at Siena University. Under the mentorship of Dr. Simone Rossi at Siena University, Dr. Mantovani received his PhD in Applied Neurological Sciences. His graduate work focused on neurophysiological correlates of psychiatric disorders. Under the mentorship of Dr. Sarah H. Lisanby, Director of the Division of Brain Stimulation and Therapeutic Modulation, as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University, he designed and performed open and sham-controlled trials of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) in the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Tourette Syndrome, Panic Disorder, Depersonalization Disorder, and Major Depression. He is an Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Psychiatry of Columbia University.

European University Institute

Dante, Sanudo and Marco Polo: romance, crusade and the perpetuation of travel literature as a genre

2007-2008

Antonio Garcia Espada graduated at the Complutense University of Madrid with a degree in Medieval History. His research about the Medieval Travellers to the Indies started at the Jawaharlal Nehru University of Delhi under an anthropological methodology that proved useful to elucidate some of the most puzzling episodes of the narratives of the 14th century travellers. At the European University Institute of Florence his research entered a new stage deeply influenced by the main concerns of the Modern European Expansion. The relation of the first European travel literature to Asia with commerce and the aggressive ideology of the Church against the Muslims became the centre of his dissertation, which was awarded with the Ph. D degree in May 2006. At the Italian Academy he will continue his exploration of the links between the travel literature and romance, and how the symbiosis between these two genres empowered the transmission to the Modern era of a particular idea of otherness and conquest, born at the end of the 13th century. His main areas of interest are travelogue, crusade, mendicant orders, Mongol expansion, cartography, origins of individualism and comparative literature.

Università di Napoli

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Inhibition of EGF Signaling in Human Cancer Cells

2005-2006: Fall

Antonio Feliciello (M.D., Ph.D) is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Pathology at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Pathology, University of Naples, Italy and currently is a Fellow at the Italian Academy; he is also a visiting scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Max Gottesman at the Institute of Cancer Research, Columbia University. The main focus of Dr. Feliciello's research is the definition of the molecular mechanism(s) underlying the biological functions of hormones and neurotransmitters. This is relevant to the secretion of hormones in endocrine glands and the development of certain types of human cancers. During his residency at Columbia, Dr. Feliciello will concentrate on the spatial and temporal framework of hormone action and cancer growth. The ultimate goal of this research is to improve our understanding of human cancer and hormone action, and to develop new tools for a targeted therapy.

Centre André Chastel CNRS – Sorbonne Université (France)

Sottosopra: bodily reversals in early modern and modern images

2022-2023: Spring

Antonella Fenech is an art historian, researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Centre André Chastel / Sorbonne University (Paris, France). She has been a Fellow of the Académie de France in Rome-Villa Médicis, and received grants from the École Française in Rome and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

Her research has been focused on the political and cultural dimension of artistic and visual productions in Early Modern Italy (Giorgio Vasari. La fabrique de l’allégorie, Olschki, 2011; Histoire de Florence par la peinture, Citadelle et Mazenod, 2012; Frises peintes. Le décor des villas et palais au Cinquecento, Somogy/Académie de France, 2017, co-ed. A. Lemoine; Les façades peintes - XVe-XVIIe siècle, co-ed. J. Koering, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor with F. Alberti of the book, Disturbing bodies. Images et imaginary in Early modern period (forthcoming).

Her current studies concern, firstly, visual representations of ludic practices in images as well as games, pastime and leisure, and the ways they shape social practices, spaces and bodies in Early modern Europe (among others papers, “Ludic Marginalities: The Other as Player in Early Modern Visual Culture“, Ludica 21-22, 2015/2016, 25-46; “Geste et désir dans les imaginaires du jeu (première modernité" ) in V. Boudier, G. Careri et E. Myara ed., L’invention du geste amoureux dans la peinture de la Renaissance (Peter Lang, 2020), 167-198). Secondly, she is working on a book project (entitled: Corps à contresens), which addresses the modalities, functions, semantics and expressions of human body depicted upside-down in Early modern and modern European visual culture.

At the Italian Academy she will be focusing on this research by investigating the visual forms of punitive bodily reversals.

Website: http://www.centrechastel.paris-sorbonne.fr/membres/antonella-fenech-kroke

The Pennsylvania State University

The Salerno ivories

2012-2013: Spring

Dr. Cutler is the Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Penn State University. The author of numerous books and articles, he has established himself as an international expert on ivory carving with such works as The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society in Byzantium (Princeton University Press). His most recent book is Byzantium, Italy and the North: Papers on Cultural Relations (Pindar Press). Dr. Cutler has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a resident in art history at the American Academy in Rome, and was awarded the Médaille François Ier of the Collège de France, Paris. He has held four fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University's Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C., and has been the Paul Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He received the Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2001-2002 and was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago during spring 2001. Dr. Cutler was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 2002-2003 and was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2005. In 2007, he was awarded the College of Arts and Architecture Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching. He is currently working on his book, The Empire of Things: Gifts and Gift Exchange between Byzantium, the Islamic World, and Beyond. In spring 2009 he was a senior research associate at the Khalili Centre at Oxford University, and in 2011-2012 he returned to Oxford as Slade Professor of Fine Art.

Bucknell University

Music as Propaganda in Mussolini's Italy: Six Studies

2002-2003

Spring

Annie Randall is Associate Professor of Musicology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. She received her undergraduate degree in early modern European history (1450-1750) from University of Kent at Canterbury, England, and her Ph.D. in 1995 in historical musicology from College Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include music and culture in late 18th century Weimar, music and gender, music and politics, and Puccini's late operas.
She is co-author (with Rosalind Davis) of "Puccini and 'The Girl': History and Reception of La Fanciulla del West [Girl of the Golden West]" (forthcoming), and is currently editing a book of essays on music, politics, and power for Routledge. At the Italian Academy she will be working on the book project Music, Fascism, and Resistance in Mussolini's Italy, an ethnographic and archival study of the transmission of political ideology through music (popular song, radio, film) during the fascist era and after.

Università di Modena

Self-Knowledge

2003-2004: Spring

Annalisa Coliva (Milan 1973), MA (Bologna), M. Litt. (St. Andrews), PhD (St. Andrews), PhD in Philosophy of language (Vercelli, Italy), Fulbright Fellow 2002-2003 (Columbia, NY), after teaching and researching at Bologna and Fribourg (CH) Universities, is now a lecturer at the University of Modena. Her main interests are in history of analytic philosophy and in philosophy of mind and epistemology. Among her publications: (with Elisabetta Sacchi) Singular Thoughts. Perceptual-Demonstrative Thoughts and I-Thoughts, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2001, Moore e Wittgenstein: scetticismo, certezza e senso commune, Padova, Il Poligrafo, 2003. She has published several papers on the topics of philosophy of perception, I-thoughts, philosophy of psychiatry, current interpretations of Moore's proof of an external world and history of analytic philosophy, appeared in journals such as The Journal of Philosophy, Dialectica, Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry and in collected volumes both in English and Italian.
At the Academy she will be working on an on-going project on the topic of our knowledge of our own mental states.

Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna (Italy)

Socio-economic roots of the crisis of liberal democracy: the Italian case

2023–2024: Fall

Anna Soci is Alma Mater Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna, Italy, where she was Full Professor of Economics until 2019. She is currently a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

She studied in Bologna and Princeton, and she held various scholarly positions in Italian and foreign universities: Research Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, Jemolo Fellow at the Nuffield College in Oxford, Senior Visiting Fellow and Associate at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Visiting Professor at the Universidad de Externado in Santa Fè de Bogotà, Colombia, and at the Free University of Bozen. She was a member of the Academy Advisory Board of the Network for European Studies, University of Helsinki; evaluator of proposals for Marie Curie Development Host Fellowships and Marie Curie Training Sites of the Human Potential Programme, on the behalf of the European Commission, Direction XII; referee for research-project evaluation on the behalf of the Italian Ministry for the University and Research.

She coordinated international research groups and organized research-meetings and conferences. In particular, she was the principal investigator of the European Union research project in local development named “TERA: territorial aspects of enterprise development in remote rural areas,” financed in the Sixth Framework Programme, Priority [8]: Scientific Support to Policies. She had several research collaborations with various Research Centres and Publishers, and she is a referee for national and international economic journals. Her research interests are currently in Economics and Politics, particularly in Economic Inequality, and formerly in Macroeconomic Theory, New Economic Geography and Foreign Direct Investment, International Economics, and Applied Economics. She has published widely in international and national peer-reviewed academic journals, in addition to being the author of several books and many working papers presented in international and national conferences and seminars.

Università di Bologna

The relationship between democracy and inequality in developed and stable economies

2011-2012: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Global Development and Finance

Anna Soci studied in Bologna (I) and Princeton (USA). She is currently Full Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna, life-member of Clare Hall in Cambridge (UK), Visitor at the Land Economy Department, University of Cambridge (UK) and member of the Academy Advisory Board of the Network for European Studies, University of Helsinki. Responsible of several international and national research projects, she has just finished coordinating the project TERA financed by the European Union in the 6FP. Dr. Soci's main research topics have been through time, social accounting frameworks, new-economic geography, foreign direct investment, and macroeconomic theory. Her research work was published in refereed international and national journals and presented in international and national seminars and conferences. Her personal web page is http://www2.dse.unibo.it/dsa/profile.php?id=81

Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

The Italian contribution to the European integration process: from the critique of sovereignty to the concept of civilian power

2014-2015: Spring

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.

Università degli Studi di Verona

Neurophysiology of emotional memory

2007-2008

Dr. Anna Ipata is at present an Associate Research Assistant at the Mahoney Center for Mind and Brain of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University, with an interest in the study of the neuronal basis of visual and cognitive functions in humans and primates. Her research covers the study of visual functions in children with cerebral damage and single neuron recording in alert monkeys. Dr. Ipata took her medical degree at the University of Pisa, where she also completed her residency in Child Neurology and Psychiatry. During the residency, she performed studies focused on the early diagnosis of visual disorders in children with cortical damage, using psychophysical and neurophysiological techniques. After the residency she moved to the Department of Physiology and Vision of the University of Verona for a Ph.D. program in neuroscience. In Verona she studied the neural basis of visual attention in the visual cortex of non-human primates. After completing her Ph.D., she moved to the sensoriomotor research laboratory of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where she worked as a postdoc under the supervision of Prof. Michael Goldberg. In 2002 she moved to Columbia University with Prof. Goldberg and set up a new laboratory of neurophysiology. Since her arrival in the US, the main focus of her research has been the study of the neuronal substrates of cognitive functions in non-human primates, in particular the role of the parietal cortex in the exploration of the visual scene in monkeys.

Università di Pavia (Italy)

Building the West: literary agents as Italian and American Cold War players

2024–2025: Spring

Anna Ferrando is a tenure-track researcher in Contemporary History (RTD-B) and teaches Transnational History of Culture in Contemporary Italy at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals on the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, her main focus being cultural mediators and mediation in the 20th century. Focusing on these themes are the monograph Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book Hunters. Literary Agents under Fascism] (Milan, FrancoAngeli, 2019), which was awarded the SISSCO Prize for “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History, and the book she edited on translations under Fascism titled Stranieri all’ombra del Duce. Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce. Translations During Fascism] (Milan, FrancoAngeli, 2019). For the past two years she has devoted herself to the history of the Adelphi publishing house, on which she wrote Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938–1994) [Adelphi. The Origins of a Publishing House (1938–1994)] (Rome, Carocci, 2023). She is currently working on media history in the Mediterranean area, with a specific focus on the relations among information, freedom of expression, political power, and diplomacy: her current research focuses on the role of Western news agencies and Arab journalism in Egypt's strategic media hub from the 1920s through the 1950s. She has already published a number of contributions on this topic including “La libertà impossibile. Informazione e potere politico in Egitto (1922–1955) [Impossible Freedom. Information and Political Power in Egypt (1922–1955)],” in Contemporary World, 3/2021, pp. 5–41.

Università del Piemonte Orientale

Cultural and religious diversity: social standards and the principle of equal respect

2014-2015: Spring

Anna Elisabetta Galeotti is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli. She studied at the University of Pavia, and spent several years as Research Fellow at various Universities and Research Centers such as Cambride University, the European University Institute at Florence, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Center for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs of St.Andrews and the Edmund Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Among her works: Toleration as Recognition, Cambridge University Press 2002; “Relativism, Universalism, and Applied Ethics: The Case of Female Circumcision”, Constellations 2007; “Respect as Recognition” in The Plural States of Recognition ( 2010), “The place of conscientious objection in liberal democracy” in Diversity in Europe (2011), “Self-Deception: Intentional Plan or Mental Event?” Humana Mente, (2012), “Toleration and Purpose Built Mosques. Contestations in Contemporary Europe”, in How Group Matters (2014), “Liars or Self-Deceived? Reflections on Political Deception” Political Study (2014). 

Web page: http://www.lett.unipmn.it/docenti/galeotti/

Universiteit Antwerpen

Remembering the future: on animal foresight thinking

2015-2016: Spring

Angelica Kaufmann (Milan, 1987) is a Philosopher of Mind interested in the insights that Psychology and Anthropology can provide to contemporary theories on the evolution of the mind. Her research focus is on nonhuman primates' cognition. Angelica will join the Italian Academy as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, with a double appointment at Gottingen University. She will soon complete her doctoral studies at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology of the University of Antwerp, where she has been working with Bence Nanay on a project named "The Origins of Social Cognition." During her PhD she visited Warwick University under the supervision of Stephen Butterfill. She was educated in Philosophy of Mind at The University of Edinburgh and, previously, in Logic and Philosophy of Science at The University of Milan, her hometown.

Web page: https://sites.google.com/site/angelicakaufmann/home

Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts (USA)

Lorenzo Ghiberti and the Rebirth of Sculpture: a New Biography

2022-2023: Spring

Andrew Butterfield concentrates on the discovery, authentication, and sale of museum quality masterpieces of European art.  A preeminent scholar-dealer, he combines thirty years of experience at the highest level in every sector of the art world: academia, museums, and the market.

Butterfield has found and sold dozens of major works of art, including important discoveries of paintings and sculptures by Bernini, Donatello, and Mantegna. His clients include many of the top museums in the world, such as the Musée du Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum.

He has published more than one hundred articles and books, on subjects ranging from Fra Angelico to Picasso. His research has won many prestigious awards, among them The Mitchell Prize for Best Book in the Visual Arts.

He was Curator of the exhibition, Verrocchio, Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence at the National Gallery of Art in 2019.

Universität Basel (Switzerland)

The artist’s self: Benvenuto Cellini and the invention of the modern artist

2022-2023: Spring

Andreas Beyer, Art Historian, has been the Chair for the History of Art of the Early Modern Era at the University of Basel/Switzerland since 2003. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Florence and Frankfurt am Main. Habilitation in 1994 at the University of Bonn. He has held professorships at the Universities of Jena and Aachen and was Director of the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris from 2009 to 2014. From 1999 to 2013, he was editor of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.
He has also been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Since 2013, he has been the speaker of the international research-group "Bilderfahrzeuge - Aby Warburg's Legacy and the Future of Iconology".
His main research topics are art and architecture of the modern era, political iconology, methodology and the history of the humanities.

Select publications: Parthenope. Neapel und der Süden der Renaissance, Deutscher Kunstverlag, München/Berlin 2000; Portraits. A History, Abrams, New York 2003; together with Matteo Burioni and Johannes Grave: Das Auge der Architektur, Fink Verlag, München 2011; together with Angela Mengoni and Antonia von Schöning: Interpositions. Montage des images et production du sens, Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris 2014; Die Kunst – zur Sprache gebracht, Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 2017.

For full publication-list see: https://kunstgeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/andreas-beyer/

LUISS University (Italy)

The role of arts and humanities in AI-enhanced higher education

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Andrea Prencipe is a Professor of Organisation & Innovation. His international career spans multiple countries, including Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, the US, and Vietnam. He began his career at SPRU (University of Sussex, UK), gaining recognition as a leading scholar in the innovation studies community, with publications in Administrative Science Quarterly, Industrial and Corporate Change, Organization Science, Research Policy, and with international publishers – e.g., Oxford University Press, Palgrave MacMillan and Edward Elgar. His research focuses on innovation-related issues in organisations and higher education institutions and on project-based organising. Andrea has been Associate Editor of the Journal of Management Studies.

As Rector of Luiss University, Andrea has designed and led a major transformation that has elevated the institution to global prominence: he has launched high-impact initiatives, e.g., Luiss Diplomatic Forum; the Luiss Global Fellowship; and the Luiss Nobel Lecture Series, an annual event featuring lectures and debates with Nobel Prize winners.

Andrea's expertise extends beyond academia, with a significant role at the Finmeccanica Group (now Leonardo Company), where he delivered strategic insights bridging research and industry needs. His deep understanding of both sectors positions him to navigate complex challenges and deliver impactful results. Andrea has introduced the enquiry-based educational model to prepare students for the fast-paced demands of today’s and future jobs markets. He currently pursues research on educational innovation with a specific focus on the role of Arts and Humanities in higher education.

More information: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-prencipe/

University of Birmingham

Cognition, biases, and rationality: studies in the philosophy and psychology of judgment and decision-making

2016-2017: Spring

Andrea Polonioli holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. He has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Sidney Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Medicine and Technology, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He will soon start working as a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Birmingham as part of a project exploring the Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts (PERFECT). His area of specialization is philosophy of psychology and his work is interdisciplinary and empirically informed. He is committed to treating philosophy as a tool for practical engagement with the world. He also has research interests in science ethics and scientometrics.

Web page: www.andreapolonioli.com

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).

Università degli Studi di Milano

Mneme. Collective Memory and Imaginative World

2003-2004

Andrea Pinotti (Mantova, 1967) graduated summa cum laude in Philosophy at the University of Milan, with a thesis entitled: 'The 'Eternal Gothic': Wilhelm Worringer's Art Theory. With grants from the University of Milan, he then studied at the University "S. Orsola Benincasa" in Naples (1992-1993), and at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (1994-1995), investigating the German aesthetic theories based on the concept of "empathy". His findings were published in an anthology entitled Aesthetics and Empathy. In 1998 he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Milan. His thesis, originally entitled Style and Apriori: Art History and Transcendental Aesthetics, was published under the title The Body of Style. History of Art as History of Aesthetics: Semper, Riegl and Wölfflin. He then worked as a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan (1999-2002) on a project entitled Form, Symbol and Image: Aesthetics, Science of Expression and Philosophy of Culture in Aby Warburg's School. During this period he published two books: one devoted to the influence of Art Historians, such as Riegl and Wölfflin, on Walter Benjamin' theory of perception (Little History of Distance) and another concerning Goethe's morphological influence upon Warburg's theory of the collective memory of images in Western culture, specifically in the Italian Renaissance (Memories of the Neutra). He is presently a research fellow ("ricercatore") in Aesthetics in the same department, focusing on the physiologists (such as Ewald Hering and Richard Semon) who influenced some of the most significant theories of collective memory in 20th century (Aby Warburg, Carl G. Jung). He is also involved in the Italian Edition Project of Aby Warburg's Works (Warburg Institute-Nino Aragno Edizioni).

Gran Sasso Science Institute (Italy)

Binary black hole systems as particle physics laboratories in dark matter environments

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Andrea Maselli is an Associate Professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute, an international PhD school and research center in Italy. After earning his MSc and PhD at Sapienza University of Rome, he held research positions at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in Portsmouth, the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the University of Tübingen, and Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon.

His research focuses on strong gravity astrophysics and the modeling of the Universe’s most compact objects—black holes and neutron stars—which act as sources of gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals, and as natural laboratories for testing fundamental physics under extreme conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth.

He is actively involved in international collaborations developing the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, including the Einstein Telescope, the space-based mission LISA, and the Lunar Gravitational Wave Antenna. These instruments will observe black holes evolving in the most remote regions of the Cosmos.

At the Italian Academy, he will investigate how astrophysical environments interact with compact objects, and explore how gas, electromagnetic fields, and potentially unknown forms of matter that shape our Universe affect the evolution of black holes and stars in the final stages of their life.

More information: https://andreamaselli85.wixsite.com/home

Composer and Theater Director (Venice, Italy)

Music in metamorphosis: evolution / involution / or transformation?

2022-2023: Spring

Andrea Liberovici studied composition, violin and viola at the Venice and Turin conservatories, acting at Teatro Stabile in Genoa, and singing with Cathy Berberian. In 1996, thanks to his crucial encounter with the great Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti (librettist of Luciano Berio), he established the Teatro del Suono. Through his research into sound, he thus developed an original viewpoint that is unique on the theatrical and music scene. Because of his exceptionality and research, critics have described Liberovici as a “global composer”, a definition that is unquestionably challenging, but that fully summarizes his work. He starts from the assumption that everything that is in “motion” (cinema, words, gestures, and so on) is based on the principles of music: rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony. In fact, Liberovici is the author of the sounds, music, images and texts for his projects, and also directs them, thus giving his multimedia works the theatrical/stylistic uniformity that similar projects involving several people tend to lack. 

Over the last decade Liberovici has created more than 35 projects which explore the relationship between music, poetry, theatre and technology in collaboration with such renowned artists as Yurij Bashmet, Claudia Cardinale, Peter Greenaway, Edoardo Sanguineti, Judith Malina, Vittorio Gassman, Ivry Gitlis, Regina Carter. His music has been performed by Yurij Basmeth and Moscow Soloist, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Montreal), Toscanini Orchestra, Teatro Carlo Felice Orchestra, Ars Nova Ensemble (Paris), Jeffrey Ziegler (New York) and Quartetto Prometeo, Helga Davis (New York) and others.

He wrote a piece for piano and violin dedicated to Martha Argerich and Ivry Gitlis, which was played during the Martha Argerich Festival in Lugano in 2015.

His works have also been presented and produced by the landmark cultural institutions such as the Teatro di Roma, the Apollo Theater and the Italian Academy in New York, La Fenice in Venice and Salle Olivier Messiaen and Philharmonie in Paris. 

He has also worked in residence at INA-GRM and France Culture in Paris, STEIM Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, GMEM National Centre of Musical Creation in Marseille.

His latest work, Trilogy in Two (2019) is the peak of his exploration of different languages, which come to be woven together. “I believe that the composer of the future will increasingly look like an audio-visual composer, in that very order: Prima la musica!”

The Canadian musicologist Jean - Jacques Nattiez defined his work: “Andrea Liberovici is a composer of his time. (...) His works narrate the tragedy of post-modern humanity.
(J.J Nattiez, “Portrait of the composer by Frankenstein”, 2006) 

www.liberovici.it

(photo by Paolo Porto)

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

Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria) 

Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art 

Borderland modernities in the Adriatic: women, art and institutions from the Habsburgs to the Italian Fascists, 1900–1939 

2026–2027: Spring

Ana is an art historian and curator specializing in early twentieth-century European avant-garde and modernist art. She studied art history and English language and literature at the University of Rijeka, where she completed both her BA and MA degrees. In 2022, she completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London with a thesis titled “D’Annunzio’s Futurists: Fiume from 1914 to 1934”, supported by a Courtauld Scholarship and a Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England award. During and after her doctorate, she combined research, teaching, and curatorial work, holding teaching posts at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Northwestern Polytechnic in Canada. From 2023, she worked as Senior Research Officer at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in London, where she continues as a consultant and recently curated the exhibition “Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl” (2026). Until December 2026, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), where she was working on her first book, From Habsburg Corpus Separatum to Imperial Afterlives: Visual Politics and Art in Fiume. Her research has appeared in journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues, including International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Peristil, and Immediations.

Her time at the Italian Academy will be dedicated to developing a new research project on women artists and their position within art institutions and spaces in the port cities of Fiume (Rijeka), Capodistria (Koper), and Trieste during the first half of the twentieth century, as these towns moved through the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, geopolitical ambiguity, paramilitary occupation, and the formation of new nation-states.

Independent Scholar

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostro engram

2002-2003

Dr. Amy S. Morris has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Los Angeles (Medieval Italian and French Literature and Literary Theory), did extensive research at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, and was trained at the Università degli Studi at Firenze (and the Scuola di Lingua e Cultura Italiana per Stranieri, Siena). Her literary interests are in Peircean semiotics and Dante. She spent seven years at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities on projects including: Nietzsche and 'An Architecture of our Minds'; Dosso's Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy; Art/History: Objects, Meanings, Judgments; Memory, History, Narrative; Perception/Art, The Humanities and Public Culture, and substantial bibliographical research on aspects of neurological processes involved in the perception of art.
She has recently published Brainquake (Xlibris, 2003), which is based primarily on her personal experiences with adult-onset epilepsy. The combination of her intellectual background in literature, art history, and vision, her personal experiences, and her subsequent intellectual interests in the larger issues of the neurosciences, has put her at the juncture of Art and Neuroscience.

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

Politecnico di Torino (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

“Golpe de muerte”: The city that (almost) disappeared: the Ciudad Lineal in Madrid

2023–2024: Spring

Alice Pozzati has been engaged in the field of historical-archival research for the analysis of urban transformations (18th–20th century) in Turin and Madrid since 2014. She got her PhD in 2022 with a thesis titled From Theory to Practice. Madrid’s Ciudad Lineal, the project of an entrepreneur, Arturo Soria y Mata (supervisor: Annalisa Dameri, PhD in Architectural and Landscape Heritage, Department of Architecture and Design of the Politecnico di Torino, Italy). She has been included in the Roll of scholars and experts from outside the Politecnico di Torino qualified to carry out teaching activities (architectural history and history of the city) since 2016. She is a contract professor in charge of the introductory seminar for the Master’s Degree in Architecture for Sustainability, “Architecture, Environment, Resources: Histories and Projects” (academic year 2022/2023). Starting in January 2023 she has been working as a research fellow at the Politecnico di Torino for a project on the establishment of the Turin School of Architecture in the early 20th century.

After graduating as a junior architect from the University of Parma (in 2012), she got her degree in “Architecture for the Restoration and Enhancement of Heritage” (in 2014) from the Politecnico di Torino with a thesis about the urban transformations of a Turinese neighborhood (San Salvario) designed in the second half of the 19th century. She worked at the historical archives of the city as an intern and attended the School of Archival Science, Paleography and Diplomacy of the State Archives (2015–2017). She was an intern at the Polo Museale della Liguria (as a winner of the call for “130 young people for culture” of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, September 2015) in a research project concerning Spanish-style fortified architecture in western Liguria. Over the years she has published more than 20 papers regarding her research in the field of the history of architecture, city, and landscape in the contemporary age.

University of Turin (Italy)

Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art 

In others’ hands: retouching and manipulating works on paper in Early Modern Europe 

2026–2027: Fall

Alice Ottazzi is an art historian specialized in the history of drawing and printmaking in the Early Modern period. Her scholarship explores the artistic and epistemological agency of graphic arts and connects it with art theory, material studies, and the history of ideas and knowledge. In her work, she examines the circulation of objects, people, and ideas with a particular focus on Great Britain, France, and Italy. She is interested in how the mechanisms of mobility, migration, trading, collecting, and reception shaped the visual and material entanglements of artistic production, the afterlives of works of art, and art theory.

She received her PhD in art history from the University of Turin and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, and her thesis won the Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis (2020). She was post-doctoral fellow at University Paris Nanterre (2022–2024), at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2024) and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut – Max-Planck-Institut of Florence (2025). She also taught at the universities of Aix–Marseille, Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne and Franche–Comté, and she has been collaborating with the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome).

Her book Trésors d’une île. La ricezione della scuola inglese a Parigi nel XVIII secolo was published in 2024 (Polistampa) with the support of the Tavolozza Foundation.

Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania (USA) 

Cultivating change: Bartram’s Garden, invasive species, and the environmental history of the Mid-Atlantic 

2026–2027: 12 months

Alexandria Mitchem Hansen is an archaeologist and researcher whose work investigates the intersections of natural history, botanical science, and environmental change. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University; her dissertation, “‘Everything in ye universe in thair own nature’: An Archaeology of Natural History at Bartram’s Garden,” examined Philadelphia’s most prominent 18th-century botanical garden as a dynamic ecological and conceptual space. Her research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Explorers Club, and the Penn Museum.

Moving beyond traditional human-centric records, Alexandria utilizes “ecological archives”—including foraging animal behaviors and field weed naturalization—to understand how historic landscapes were shaped by diverse biological actors. As a Fellow at the Italian Academy, she will expand this work through sediment coring and palynological analysis, offering new insights into the relationship between historic horticulture and Mid-Atlantic environmental shifts. Alexandria is also a dedicated educator committed to public scholarship, having developed numerous public-facing tours and lectures to bring archaeological research to broader audiences.

University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ; France)

Western travelers, local emissaries and ancient monuments in Ottoman Greece (1784–1834)

2025–⁠2026: Spring

Alessia Zambon is senior lecturer in Art History and Cultural Heritage in the History Department of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (University Paris–⁠Saclay). Her research focuses on the explorations and acquisitions of antiquities by western travelers and local emissaries in Southern Italy, the Ottoman Empire and Greece in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and on the history of collections in Europe.

She is the author of Aux origines de l'archéologie en Grèce: Fauvel et sa méthode (Paris, INHA-CTHS, 2014), a book resulting from her dissertation and focusing on the archaeological work of the painter Louis François Fauvel (1753–⁠1838) in Greece and the Ottoman Empire. She has been scholar associate at the Getty Villa (2024), visiting scholar at Columbia University (2022) and at the École française d'Athènes (2019), associate member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2011–⁠2012), postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2010–⁠2011), and associate researcher at the Département des Estampes et de la photographie of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2008–⁠2011). She has participated in several international research projects on the history of archaeology and the constitution of France's ancient heritage. In 2022, she edited with Irini Apostolou the book Du pillage à la conscience patrimoniale en Grèce et dans l’Empire ottoman : le rôle des Français et des autres Occidentaux (XVIIIe–⁠XIXe s.), that questions how the looting of antiquities, carried out by Western countries between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, paved the way to the emergence of a heritage consciousness in Greece and the Ottoman Empire (https://books.openedition.org/ausonius/22244). Her next book, edited with Vincent Puech and Delphine Carrangeot, will be published in 2026 with the title: Les transferts d’antiquites: objets, collections, processus, patrimonialisation (de l’Antiquite au XIXe s.).

More information: https://www.ieci.uvsq.fr/mme-alessia-zambon

Columbia University

Neural bases of musical experience

2010-2011

Alessia Pannese studied music theory (Conservatorio di musica di Roma "Santa Cecilia"), law (Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza"), veterinary medicine (Università degli studi di Perugia), veterinary neuroscience (University of Cambridge, UK), and neurobiology (Columbia University). Her research interests span across medical (anaesthesia, natural and induced altered states of consciousness), cognitive (self-awareness, learning, brain laterality and plasticity), philosophical (philosophy of science), and art-related fields (creativity, esthetic resonance). For her doctoral work, she investigated the neural correlates of self-face perception and self-consciousness. During her appointment as "Art & Neuroscience Fellow" she plans to explore the neuronal response to sound in musicians and non-musicians. Her long-term goal is to contribute to the development of cross-cultural discourse between artistic and scientific thought, as a way to achieve synthesis of knowledge and generation of common understanding.

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

Institut Jean Nicod

CNRS-EHESS-ENS

The viewer as simulated artist

2011-2012: Spring

Alessandro Pignocchi studied Biology and Cognitive Science. He received a PhD in philosophy of art and cognitive science, directed by Roberto Casati, at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. His thesis supported the proposal that when perceiving a drawing we automatically simulate some aspects of the gesture of the draftsman and that this "motor perception" is a first step of the recovery of the draftsman's intentions. Furthermore, he discussed the consequence of the motor perception hypothesis for the learning of drawing and for the appreciation of drawings and pictures. Dr. Pignocchi recently published a book in which he claims that when perceiving an artwork we automatically and in part unconsciously attribute intentions to the artist, and that the details of the intentional process that we reconstruct determine all our experience of the artwork, including its perception. He is currently working on a second book in which he uses this intentional model to analyse a set of artworks, including movies, novels, comics and paintings.

Istituto IUAV di Venezia

Domenichino and the "maniera antica" in architecture

2007-2008

Alessandro Borgomainerio graduated at Venice's University of Architecture (Università IUAV di Venezia) and he obtained his Ph.D. degree there in 2004. He is currently Teaching Assistant at the Department of History of Architecture at University IUAV in Venice. Alessandro Borgomainerio's main research focuses on the value of antiquity in Seicento Art and Theory.
In his Ph.D. thesis (Il cardinal Francesco Barberini il Laterano e l'antichità restituita) he has investigated Cardinal Barberini's programme of restoration of Christian antiquities and the role of architects, scholars and patrons involved in it. This topic is developed in a recent published article that analyzes the value of antiquarian images in Francesco Borromini's late works (Su alcuni motivi in San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane), and in his teaching activities at the University of Venice (mostly seminars). At the Italian Academy he will work on Domenichino's architectural activity and the antiquarian value of his work, due mostly to his relationship with his patron, the scholar Giovan Battista Agucchi and the Roman cultural context.
Although Seicento architecture is the subject of other articles he is writing (ones dedicated to civil architecture in Venice and the Seicento restoration of the Lateran Baptistery in Rome), Borgomainerio is also interested in modern architecture and in particular in architectural theory of Fin de siècle Vienna. He has completed studies of Adolf Loos' writings for a recent exhibition catalogue, and he is now working on an Italian edition of Loos' Selected Writings.

Universita' di Palermo

Black Italia: Narrations and Representations of Blacks in Contemporary Italy

2004-2005

Alessandra Di Maio is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Palermo, Italy. She received her Italian doctorate in Comparative Studies and Literary Sciences from the Universities of Bari and Pavia in 1995. She further specialized in the United States, where she first was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and where she taught at different institutions as Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. Her area of specialization includes migratory, postcolonial, diasporan and black studies, with a particular attention to how issues of ethnicity, gender, representation, narration, memory and forgetting interact in the formation of national and transnational identities. Among her publications are the volumes Tutuola at The University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000); and the translation and introduction to Nuruddin Farah's Rifugiati (Rome: Meltemi, 2003; original title Yesterday, Tomorrow), which was awarded the Sandro Onofri Prize. Her research at the Italian Academy focuses on the narration and representation of people of African descent in contemporary artistic productions from and about Italy.

Columbia University

The reception of Christian antiquity in the post-Tridentine era: cultural change and artistic innovation in late sixteenth-century Rome

2018-2019: Fall and Spring

Tufts University

Aural anamorphosis and sound clues: aesthetics of synchronization in film.

2013-2014: Fall

Alessandra Campana is associate professor of music at Tufts University. Her research focuses on opera and film sound. She has worked and published on Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, Donizetti, focussing on issues of staging, theatricality, and performance. Her book, titled Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is part of the editorial team of the new Opera Quarterly (OUP) and co-chair with Anne Shreffler and Sindhumathi Revuluri of the Opera Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Centre at Harvard. At the Italian Academy she is working on her next book on sound and music synchronization in film.

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

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.

Politecnico di Milano

How Architects Address the Urban Memory of the Violent Past

2016-2017: Fall

Dr. Aleksandar Staničić is an independent researcher, architectural theorist and critic, and practicing architect. He received his Ph.D. in Architectural Composition from the Politecnico di Milano in 2014, with the Doctor Europaeus Certification. His research examines the phenomena of calculated destruction of architecture in modern-day conflicts, the fabrication of identity and memory via the (mis)treatment of architectural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, and disaster resilience. Dr. Staničić's work philosophy is based on coalescing architectural practice with scholarly theories, teaching and research. At the Italian Academy he will investigate the response of architectural design to the political destruction of buildings as part of the forthcoming book manuscript Vocabulary of the Architecture of Disaster.

Web page: https://polimi.academia.edu/AleksandarStanicic

Università degli Studi di Trieste

Charge transport in molecular devices

2006-2007

Alberto Morgante received his degree and PhD in Physics from the University of Trieste where he is associate Professor of Physics at the Physics Department since 1999. He teaches Electromagnetism, optics and relativity to Physics students. He is head of the CNR-INFM research project of the National Laboratory TASC-INFM in Trieste called Nano3, dedicated mainly to studies of organic molecules in gas-phase and thin films and of fullerene and nanotube based materials. He is the scientific coordinator of the ALOISA beamline of the Italian Synchrotron light source Elettra.
He is also the coordinator of various MIUR (Ministry of Instruction, University and Research), INFM (National Institute for the Physics of Matter) and international projects.
He has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and for many years cooperated with the Fritz-Haber-Institut of the Max-Planck-Society in Berlin.
His research work is concerned mainly with the experimental study of solid surfaces and thin films by using electron, X-ray and neutral atom scattering: thermodynamics of surface structures due to reconstructions and adsorbates, studying in particular critical phenomena in 2-D phase transitions; thin film growth and inverse growth (removal); reordering kinetics of surfaces and thin films; gas-surface reactions, thin film structure and phase transitions, organic thin films and interfaces.