Fellows

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.

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.

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).

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.

Centre for Applied Vision Research, City, University of London (UK); Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia (USA)

New Approaches to 3D Vision

2022–2023: Fall and Spring
2023–2024: Fall and Spring

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 forthcoming volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B based on his Royal Society meeting 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. Before vision science Paul was a Stipendiary Lecturer in Law at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at University College London, and has been an Invited Critic in Architecture at Cambridge University, University College London, the Cass and Central St Martins.

At the Italian Academy he will work on how the brain constructs our impression of visual geometry and scale. For more details on his work please see https://linton.vision.

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.

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 Göttingen (Germany)

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.

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

Kunstuniversität Linz (Austria); Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)

Fiendish attacks: the devil as iconoclast and victim of defacing

2023–2024: Spring

Jasmin Mersmann is an art historian with a focus on Italian art and culture in the early modern period. She is professor at the University of Arts in Linz/Austria and head of the research project “unBinding Bodies” at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik Berlin. Previously she taught at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-University. In 2022, she was a research fellow at the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, in 2015/16 at the IKKM in Weimar, in 2014/15 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.

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.

Architect (Tunisia)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Mapping and documenting the Ibādī mosques in North Africa

2023–2024: Spring

I am a Tunisian Architect and I obtained my PhD from the National School of Architecture and Urban Design of Tunis; during the research for my dissertation (entitled La spatialité des mosquées Ibādītes dans l’île de Djerba et dans la pentapole du Mzab au temps des I`azzâben, étude spatio-syntaxique), I developed a catalogue of the Ibadite mosques, in which 43 mosques distributed throughout Tunisia and Algeria have been listed, analyzed, and visually represented. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Archaeological German Institute of Rome (DAI-Rom) and I have worked on publishing a collection of my own photographs of 94 Ibadite mosques of the island of Djerba (Tunisia) and the Mzab valley (Algeria), together with additional data, as part of the “North Africa Research Archive” (NARA). The next step of my project is to map the Ibadite mosques in Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria using GIS software. I am also a member of the scientific and technical committee in charge of preparing the file for the inscription of the island of Djerba on the World Heritage List; I have set out the justification for the serial property’s inscription and carried out a comparative analysis with 24 sites distributed throughout North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the rest of the world.

I have published on diverse topics such as Heritage conservation policies in the island of Djerba and the Mzab valley, Berber and Ibadite architecture in Djerba (Tunisia), the Mzab valley (Algeria), and the Nafusa mountains (Libya).

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.

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 LVIIILettura 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.