2025-2026
University of Trento (Italy)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
“Libyan itineraries” in the 1930s: the legacy of landscape in visual and written narratives of the Italian “fourth shore”
2025–2026: Spring
Virginia Magnaghi is an art historian whose interests lie primarily in the history of Italian modern art, with a particular focus on the history of Fascist visual and written culture.
She received her PhD in 2024 from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, where she defended a dissertation on the visual and written representations of the Italian natural landscape between the two wars. This is also the subject of her current book-length project.
She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento (2024–25). During her doctoral studies she was a research fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York (2021) and at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH, Stockholm (2022). In the fall of 2025, she will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome.
In addition to exploring the dialogue between visual and literary studies, she is interested in their possible intersections with the formation of national identity, and in the topics of ecocriticism and difficult heritage. She works as a critic and writer on contemporary dance and theater for the magazines Stratagemmi and La Falena. Her academic work has been published in international journals such as Studiolo, Modernism/Modernity, and L’Uomo Nero.
The Italian Academy at Columbia University will support her new project dedicated to how Italians represented Libya, and in particular its landscape, both natural and built, during the 1930s. This project is rooted in the idea of further exploring landscape as a key methodological tool when addressing the intersecting issues of representation, identity and its negotiation, colonialism and racism.
Columbia University (USA)
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
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.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
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.
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).Columbia University (USA)
NOMIS Foundation Fellow
New Theory of Visual Experience
2022–2026: Fall and Spring semesters
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.
Independent Scholar (Japan)
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Sylvo-urbanism: reframing nature and urban trees in Early Modern Rome
2025–2026: Fall
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.
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
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
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.
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 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 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.
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/
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.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
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
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/
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/
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
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
