Fellows

Università di Parma (Italy)

Embodying cultural practices: a neuropragmatic approach

2022-2023: Fall and Spring

Vittorio Gallese, MD and trained neurologist, is Professor of Psychobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Medicine & Surgery of the University of Parma, Italy, Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Department of Art History and Archeology, Columbia University, and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of London's School of Advanced Study. As a cognitive neuroscientist, his research focuses on the relationship between the sensorimotor system and cognition by investigating the neurobiological and bodily grounding of intersubjectivity, psychopathology, language and aesthetics. His major scientific contribution is the discovery of mirror neurons, together with the colleagues of Parma, and the development of a new model of perception and imagination: Embodied Simulation Theory. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and three books.

Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vittorio-Gallese

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)

Rethinking the origins of the Vatican Ethnological Museum

2022-2023: Fall

Sabina Brevaglieri is lecturer (wiss. Mitarbeiterin) at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She is an Early modern historian (PhD University of Florence), with a significant background in art history (Sapienza Università di Roma). She has been a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and Marie Curie Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, where she teaches courses in the history of knowledge. She was also awarded with further international fellowships in Münster, Wolfenbüttel, Paris, and Washington DC.

She is a specialist in early modern Rome as a site of knowledge production and a complex communicative space where many different agencies interplayed with Papal universalistic claims. She is the author of the 2019 book Natural desiderio di sapere: Roma barocca fra vecchi e nuovi mondi, Roma, Viella, La Corte dei Papi, 2019 (NdS). The book provides an innovative cultural biography of the so-called Mexican Treasury (Rome, 1651). It radically rethinks the writing of the well-known natural history of the new worlds and argues for Lincean Academy dynamics as thoroughly entangled with the vibrant Baroque Rome. Thus, NdS investigates interplays between nature and art, indigenous craftsmanship and artisanal industry, factional dynamics, confessional negotiations and competing searches for legitimation continuously redefining the shifting de-centrality of the Papal city. In addition, she edited the forthcoming Quaderni Storici special issue Missionary collecting (2022, 1). The issue addresses missionary engagement with indigenous artefacts and their preservation through time, tracing back to the early 16th century and spanning missionary museums between the 19th and 20th centuries. This work investigates the complex physical mobility and cultural transformations of artefacts and explores practices of attention, selection, accumulation, and monopolization, which encompass violence, domination, creative resistance, competing agencies, and asymmetric negotiations within the colonial spaces.

At the Italian Academy, she explores the 17th century origins of the Vatican Ethnological Museum. Her project investigates the complex entanglements of indigenous claims, missionary agencies, and Papal universalistic self-legitimation which shaped artefacts’ lives. Their entrapment in mobile collectives of actors, papers and objects will be explored, paying attention to experimental transactions, creative misunderstandings, and continuous frictions. The project engages with heritage performance and dynamics of sedimentation, as well as competing practices of patrimonializations. Against this background, a call for an interdisciplinary reflection on a tentatively defined artefact "right to endure" will be launched.
 

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.

Architectural Association School of Architecture (London, UK)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Sacred spaces in profane buildings

2022-2023: Fall

Matilde Cassani studied Architecture at Politecnico di Milano and UPC, Universidade Politecnica de Catalunya, in Barcelona. She holds a PhD in Spatial planning and Urban Development at Politecnico di Milano. She worked for GTZ, German Technical Cooperation, in Sri Lanka, where she developed research on the post-tsunami reconstruction process. She was a consultant for the World Bank in Malawi, and she’s currently a practicing architect at Matilde Cassani Studio.

Her practice deals with the spatial implications of cultural pluralism in the contemporary Western city. Fundamental themes of her research activity concern cultural difference as a generative model of building design and public space; religious differences in the contemporary city and their spatial implications (temporary places of worship, celebrations, pilgrimage sites); the relationship between public space and superdiversity in the contemporary European city.

Her works have been showcased in many cultural institutions, art galleries and were published in several magazines. She has been a resident fellow at “Akademie Schloss Solitude” in Stuttgart and at the “Headlands Center for the Arts” in San Francisco. The long-term research project “Sacred spaces in profane buildings” has been exhibited, among others, in a solo show at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. She designed the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain at the XIII Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, and she was part of the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale with the piece "A Celebration Day”, acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She was involved in the Chicago Architecture Triennale, Oslo Triennale and Manifesta12 and the XVII Architecture Biennale. She has taught and lectured in many international universities, and she currently teaches at NABA, and at the Architectural Association in London working with Unit 11.

Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca (Italy)

Socrates’ ugliness

2022-2023: Fall

Maria Luisa Catoni is Full Professor of Ancient Art History and Archaeology at IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca (Italy), founder and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage and the Research Unit Lynx: Center for the Interdisciplinary Analysis of Images, Contexts, Cultural Heritage at the same University. She has held positions as Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin; Senior Research Associate at the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; Fellow at the Deutsches Archäeologisches Institut in Rome; fixed-term researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore where she received her education and Ph.D. in Classics and Art History and where she was selected for- and offered a position of Full Professor in Ancient Art History and Archaeology.


She has published extensively in the field of Ancient Art History and Archaeology, with a special interest in non-verbal communication in Classical Antiquity, the functioning of image ecosystems, the relationships between images, medium and social practices, the technical and social processes and contexts of art production, the relationship between written and visual sources as well as the use of art narratives within political discourse in Antiquity. She has also actively researched in the field of Classical Tradition with a special attention to the contexts of XXth century art. She has participated or initiated collaborative projects at the international and national levels in the fields of Ancient Art History and Archaeology, the Classical Tradition, the role of Cultural Heritage and Classics in educational models in Italy and Europe. She has prompted a number of research collaborations with specialists in the fields of innovative methodologies for automatic data analysis, neuroscience as well as with specialists in management and economics in order to analyze the process of profound change that the professions of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage are undergoing.

Catoni has also served at the institutional level in terms of research and training in her fields of expertise.
She has long served as Panel Chair in the most interdisciplinary ERC Panel (SH5), on a number of international advisory Boards (France, Germany, Italy) as well as in national and international research evaluation and funding Committees; she sits on the Scientific/Editorial Boards of a number of scientific journals; she has served as advisor of the Italian Minister of Culture and has founded the new National School of Cultural Heritage in the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Università di Parma (Italy)

The embodied consequences of observed impossible movements: a multidisciplinary approach.

2022-2023: Fall and Spring

Prof. Maria Alessandra Umiltà, PhD, is a leading expert in social cognition and electrophysiology techniques on monkeys and humans. Her research interests include the mechanisms of inhibition of voluntary movement, the neural basis of emotion recognition in children and adults, the neural basis of social cognition, the role of the cortical sensory-motor system in the control of higher cognitive functions, and the role of the body in aesthetic experience.

She is Associate Professor of Physiology at the Department of Food and Drug, University of Parma. She is affiliated with the Unit of Neuroscience of the Department of Medicine & Surgery, University of Parma, where she leads the high-density EEG Lab. Since 2007, she has been a member of the board of the International PhD Program in Neuroscience, and she teaches Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Parma.

She has been Honorary Research Associate Fellow with the Sobell Department of Neurophysiology, Institute of Neurology, University College London with Wellcome Trust and since 2010, she has been Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Department of Art History and Archeology of Columbia University.

Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)

Imperial lararia and their religious landscape

2022-2023: Fall

I am a scholar interested in social and economic topics of the history, mainly ancient, of the Mediterranean basin. Matters such as fiscal policies of Hellenistic and Roman states, agrarian outputs of premodern farming enterprises, social mobility, demography, rates of urbanization across space and time, and the role of the State in copying with such issues have always been the center of my scholarly output. I am currently professor of Roman History at Sapienza, University of Rome, after having spent several years of research and teaching in the U.S. and research in Germany, the U.K., France, Spain and Greece. I am currently directing programs of research in Italy (Hadrian’s villa) and Kosovo (Ulpiana), programs of research and teaching on Late Antiquity (CAF Tarda Antichità, Sapienza, Rome), and a scholarly series of books on social and economic history of the ancient world (Pragmateiai). As of late 2022, I am finishing up the editorial work of two Oxford Handbooks and completing a monograph on monetary history of the Roman world (with E. Lo Cascio) for CUP.

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin - Institute for Advanced Study (Germany)

The problem of Roman copies: a transatlantic dissent

2022-2023: Fall

I was born in Florence in 1950. I studied Greek and Roman archaeology, Social anthropology and Italian literature in Basel and Munich, receiving my Ph.D. in Basel (1975). For more than ten years I was a curator in the Antikenmuseum in Berlin (West). In 1992, I moved from museum to university, teaching first in Freiburg and then, from 1998 to 2007, at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität in Munich. From 2007 to 2018 I served as rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin - Institute of Advanced Study, where I still hold the position of Permanent Fellow.

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS; France)

Human mobility, climate, and resources in the Afro-Arabian rift system (12,000–2,000 BP)

2022-2023: Fall and Spring

Lamya Khalidi is a Researcher at the CNRS, in the Cultures et Environnements: Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge (CEPAM) laboratory at the University Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006. She is an archaeologist and specialist in the late prehistory of Arabia and the Horn of Africa (12th - 1st millennium BC). Her main research interests and expertise are in environmental and landscape archaeology, with emphasis on the dynamic processes of human transformation and adaptation in response to volcanism, hydroclimate changes and human interactions in East Africa and the Middle East during the Holocene. She is a permanent member of international archaeological programs in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Republic of Djibouti, Syria, and Lebanon. Director of several projects in Yemen between 2002 and 2010, she currently directs the VAPOR-Afar project in Ethiopia. She is co-editor of three books and has authored and co-authored more than sixty scientific and mainstream articles. Her co-edited volumes include From refugia to oases: living in arid environments from prehistoric times to the present day and Contacts Between South Arabia and the Horn of Africa, From the Bronze Age to Islam.

Webpage: https://www.cepam.cnrs.fr/contact/lamya-khalidi/

University of Benin (Nigeria)

The significance of the Benin Bronzes: before and after 1897 in the repatriation question

2022-2023: Fall

Koki Eghafona has been teaching in the University in Nigeria since 1984 as a cultural anthropologist. Her research interests include: qualitative research methodology; oral literature and ethnography; peoples and cultures of Nigeria and Africa; cultural resource management and indigenous knowledge systems. She has conducted over twenty Social Impact Assessments (SIA) focusing on socio-economic surveys in rural communities. She has over sixty academic publications mainly in the area of culture, tradition, and modern slavery. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Curating Benin Cultural Materials: Towards Integrating Indigenous and Orthodox Methods,” (2001) investigated and highlighted the indigenous curatorial, conservation, and exhibition practices of the Benin people during the pre-colonial era, drawing out similarities that existed with such practices in today's museums. The thesis proposed integration of both indigenous and orthodox ways of caring for Benin cultural objects in museums.

Independent Scholar (Germany)

Paul Oskar Kristeller’s letters from Italy (1934–39)

2022-2023: Fall

Jan Eike Dunkhase is an intellectual and cultural historian based in Berlin with a focus on the history of historiography and the philosophy of history. After receiving his MA in History, Philosophy, and Jewish Studies from Heidelberg University, and his PhD in Modern History from Freie Universität Berlin, he worked as a Research Associate at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University, at the German Literature Archive Marbach, and at Bielefeld University. In 2019 he was a Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center (NYC).

He is the author of several monographs, among them Spinoza der Hebräer: Zu einer israelischen Erinnerungsfigur (2013), Absurde Geschichte: Reinhart Kosellecks historischer Existentialismus (2015), and Provinz der Moderne: Marbachs Weg zum Deutschen Literaturarchiv (2021), as well as the editor of Reinhart Koselleck’s correspondence with Carl Schmitt (2019).

Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

The birth of architectural criticism in early modern Italy

2022-2023: Spring

I published on several aspects of Renaissance Architecture, theory and historiography including books and essays on Giotto, Baccio Pontelli, Aristotele Fioravanti, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Michelangelo, Raphael, the Sangallo family, Gerolamo Genga, Medieval and Renaissance public architecture in Bologna, and religious and military architecture in the Marche region. I also published on building materials and techniques, history of design, painted architecture, Quattrocento architecture in Rome and Central Italy, the rediscovery of antiquity, and Marginalia on Renaissance architectural treatises. I dealt with Neo Renaissance architecture in New York and postwar engineering, focusing on structural engineer Mario Salvadori. I worked and published on Rudolf Wittkower and on Colin Rowe’s archival materials.

I am currently completing a book on Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s studies on Vitruvius. I was the recipient of several fellowships, including the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the Italian Academy, Columbia University and the Getty Research Institute. I am the director of the Serlio Digital Project (Avery Library, Columbia University) and I coordinated the study group of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola appointed by the Italian Ministry of Culture. I taught at Columbia University, New York and I have been Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London and at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

Webpage: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/f.benelli/en

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

2022-2023: Spring — [Visiting Fellow] The driving role of art in the breeding of a new man

2018-2019: Fall — The descent of the image and the creation of the New Man

Eric Michaud, b. 1948, is Directeur d’études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, where he holds the Professorship for Histories and Ideologies of Contemporary Art. His research interests lie in the relationships between art, politics, propaganda and the anthropological notions of race and filiation related to images.
Prior to joining the Ehess he was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg (1972-1998). He served as a Visiting Professor at the The Johns Hopkins University (1991-1992 and 2004), at Duke University (2003) and at the University of Virginia (2005). Selected Honors include an Institute for Advanced Study Membership (Princeton, 2010), a Clark Art Institute Fellowship (Williamstown, 2014) and a Getty Resarch Institute Fellowship (Los Angeles, 2015).
His books include Les invasions barbares. Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, Gallimard, 2015 ; Spanish transl. Adriana Hildalgo, 2017 ; English transl. forthcoming, MIT Press, 2019),  The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (transl. Janet Lloyd, Stanford University Press, 2004), Histoire de l’art : une discipline à ses frontières (Paris, Hazan, 2005), Fabriques de l'homme nouveau, de Léger à Mondrian (Paris, Carré, 1997).

Web page: https://www.ehess.fr/fr/personne/eric-michaud

Centre André Chastel CNRS – Sorbonne Université (France)

Sottosopra: bodily reversals in early modern and modern images

2022-2023: Spring

Antonella Fenech is an art historian, researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Centre André Chastel / Sorbonne University (Paris, France). She has been a Fellow of the Académie de France in Rome-Villa Médicis, and received grants from the École Française in Rome and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

Her research has been focused on the political and cultural dimension of artistic and visual productions in Early Modern Italy (Giorgio Vasari. La fabrique de l’allégorie, Olschki, 2011; Histoire de Florence par la peinture, Citadelle et Mazenod, 2012; Frises peintes.Le décor des villas et palais au Cinquecento, Somogy/Académie de France, 2017, co-ed. A. Lemoine; Les façades peintes - XVe-XVIIe siècle, co-ed. J. Koering, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor with F. Alberti of the book, Disturbing bodies. Images et imaginary in Early modern period (forthcoming).

Her current studies concern, firstly, visual representations of ludic practices in images as well as games, pastime and leisure, and the ways they shape social practices, spaces and bodies in Early modern Europe (among others papers, “Ludic Marginalities: The Other as Player in Early Modern Visual Culture“, Ludica 21-22, 2015/2016, 25-46; “Geste et désir dans les imaginaires du jeu (première modernité" ) in V. Boudier, G. Careri et E. Myara ed., L’invention du geste amoureux dans la peinture de la Renaissance (Peter Lang, 2020), 167-198). Secondly, she is working on a book project (entitled: Corps à contresens), which addresses the modalities, functions, semantics and expressions of human body depicted upside-down in Early modern and modern European visual culture.

At the Italian Academy she will be focusing on this research by investigating the visual forms of punitive bodily reversals.

Website: http://www.centrechastel.paris-sorbonne.fr/membres/antonella-fenech-kroke

Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts (USA)

Lorenzo Ghiberti and the Rebirth of Sculpture: a New Biography

2022-2023: Spring

Andrew Butterfield concentrates on the discovery, authentication, and sale of museum quality masterpieces of European art.  A preeminent scholar-dealer, he combines thirty years of experience at the highest level in every sector of the art world: academia, museums, and the market.

Butterfield has found and sold dozens of major works of art, including important discoveries of paintings and sculptures by Bernini, Donatello, and Mantegna. His clients include many of the top museums in the world, such as the Musée du Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum.

He has published more than one hundred articles and books, on subjects ranging from Fra Angelico to Picasso. His research has won many prestigious awards, among them The Mitchell Prize for Best Book in the Visual Arts.

He was Curator of the exhibition, Verrocchio, Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence at the National Gallery of Art in 2019.

Universität Basel (Switzerland)

The artist’s self: Benvenuto Cellini and the invention of the modern artist

2022-2023: Spring

Andreas Beyer, Art Historian, has been the Chair for the History of Art of the Early Modern Era at the University of Basel/Switzerland since 2003. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Florence and Frankfurt am Main. Habilitation in 1994 at the University of Bonn. He has held professorships at the Universities of Jena and Aachen and was Director of the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris from 2009 to 2014. From 1999 to 2013, he was editor of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.
He has also been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Since 2013, he has been the speaker of the international research-group "Bilderfahrzeuge - Aby Warburg's Legacy and the Future of Iconology".
His main research topics are art and architecture of the modern era, political iconology, methodology and the history of the humanities.

Select publications: Parthenope. Neapel und der Süden der Renaissance, Deutscher Kunstverlag, München/Berlin 2000; Portraits. A History, Abrams, New York 2003; together with Matteo Burioni and Johannes Grave: Das Auge der Architektur, Fink Verlag, München 2011; together with Angela Mengoni and Antonia von Schöning: Interpositions. Montage des images et production du sens, Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris 2014; Die Kunst – zur Sprache gebracht, Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 2017.

For full publication-list see: https://kunstgeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/andreas-beyer/

Composer and Theater Director (Venice, Italy)

Music in metamorphosis: evolution / involution / or transformation?

2022-2023: Spring

Andrea Liberovici studied composition, violin and viola at the Venice and Turin conservatories, acting at Teatro Stabile in Genoa, and singing with Cathy Berberian. In 1996, thanks to his crucial encounter with the great Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti (librettist of Luciano Berio), he established the Teatro del Suono. Through his research into sound, he thus developed an original viewpoint that is unique on the theatrical and music scene. Because of his exceptionality and research, critics have described Liberovici as a “global composer”, a definition that is unquestionably challenging, but that fully summarizes his work. He starts from the assumption that everything that is in “motion” (cinema, words, gestures, and so on) is based on the principles of music: rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony. In fact, Liberovici is the author of the sounds, music, images and texts for his projects, and also directs them, thus giving his multimedia works the theatrical/stylistic uniformity that similar projects involving several people tend to lack. 

Over the last decade Liberovici has created more than 35 projects which explore the relationship between music, poetry, theatre and technology in collaboration with such renowned artists as Yurij Bashmet, Claudia Cardinale, Peter Greenaway, Edoardo Sanguineti, Judith Malina, Vittorio Gassman, Ivry Gitlis, Regina Carter. His music has been performed by Yurij Basmeth and Moscow Soloist, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Montreal), Toscanini Orchestra, Teatro Carlo Felice Orchestra, Ars Nova Ensemble (Paris), Jeffrey Ziegler (New York) and Quartetto Prometeo, Helga Davis (New York) and others.

He wrote a piece for piano and violin dedicated to Martha Argerich and Ivry Gitlis, which was played during the Martha Argerich Festival in Lugano in 2015.

His works have also been presented and produced by the landmark cultural institutions such as the Teatro di Roma, the Apollo Theater and the Italian Academy in New York, La Fenice in Venice and Salle Olivier Messiaen and Philharmonie in Paris. 

He has also worked in residence at INA-GRM and France Culture in Paris, STEIM Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, GMEM National Centre of Musical Creation in Marseille.

His latest work, Trilogy in Two (2019) is the peak of his exploration of different languages, which come to be woven together. “I believe that the composer of the future will increasingly look like an audio-visual composer, in that very order: Prima la musica!”

The Canadian musicologist Jean - Jacques Nattiez defined his work: “Andrea Liberovici is a composer of his time. (...) His works narrate the tragedy of post-modern humanity.
(J.J Nattiez, “Portrait of the composer by Frankenstein”, 2006) 

www.liberovici.it

(photo by Paolo Porto)