Mali Caterina Alinejad Zanjani

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/