Lucia Delaini

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.