Eleonora Melandri

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