2026–2027
Accademia Italiana (Italy)
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Curating dissonance: Fascist and colonial afterlives in Italian heritage across public space, museum narratives, and digital counter-archives
2026–2027: Fall
Valentina Gioia Levy is an art historian, curator, writer, and educator whose work explores the intersections of curatorial practice, visual culture, heritage, and the production of situated forms of knowledge. Her academic formation spans both European and Asian art histories, with an early focus on aesthetics and artistic exchanges between East and West. She studied Humanities at Sapienza University of Rome and received her PhD in Arts, Aesthetics and Art Sciences from Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne in 2025 with a dissertation on contextual curating and the transformations of contextual art in a multipolar world. She is an affiliated researcher at Institut ACTE (Arts, Créations, Théories, Esthétiques), Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne.
Combining scholarly research with over fifteen years of international curatorial practice, her work investigates how artistic and curatorial practices shape cultural narratives, negotiate social and political contexts, and contribute to the interpretation of places, objects, and collective memory. Her research spans curatorial studies, exhibition histories, visual culture, monumentality, heritage, and the circulation of images across global contexts.
She has developed research and curatorial projects throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, collaborating with institutions and initiatives including the Venice Biennale, Dak’Art Biennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, LAM360 Land Art Mongolia, Something Else Cairo, Manifesta 12, MAXXI, MACRO, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. She is also the founder of GAD – Giudecca Art District in Venice and co-founder of the interdisciplinary platform ALL FAD.
Gioia Levy teaches at Accademia Italiana in Rome and has served as Visiting Professor at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Her forthcoming book, Le tournant contextuel: Art, territoires et curatelle à l’ère de la multipolarité (L’Harmattan, 2026), develops a theoretical framework for understanding contextual curatorial practice in contemporary global art.
At the Italian Academy, she will pursue research on the afterlives of twentieth-century Italian heritage, examining how monuments, architecture, archives, and curatorial frameworks shape the interpretation, preservation, and re-signification of difficult histories in the present.University of Bergamo (Italy)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
Kettle of fish: toward an art history of homoerotic imagery in the HIV/AIDS crisis
2026–2027: Spring
Stefano Mudu holds a PhD in visual culture from IUAV University of Venice. His research focuses on strategies of enactment and re-enactment in contemporary artistic production, practices of iconographic reactivation in visual culture, and the possibility of rethinking art history through the lenses of queer theory, feminism, colonialism, and pressing ecological concerns. His current work examines the role of visuality during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
He has worked as a curatorial researcher for major international exhibitions and institutions, including the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani, and “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum, New York.He is the author of the monographs Spazi Critici. I luoghi della scrittura contemporanea (2018) and Enactments: Reactivation Strategies in Contemporary Art Practices (2026). Alongside several academic essays, he regularly contributes to publications in the field.
Columbia University (USA)
NOMIS Foundation Fellow
New theory of visual experience
2022–2026: 12 months
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.
Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy)
Nonlocal models in traffic flow and elasticity
2026–2027: Spring
Nicola De Nitti is a mathematician specializing in applied analysis and partial differential equations, currently a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematical analysis at the Polytechnic University of Bari. He earned his PhD summa cum laude from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2023 under the supervision of Enrique Zuazua and then held a postdoctoral position at EPFL in Maria Colombo’s group and a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Pisa. He is a member of the European Mathematical Society Young Academy for the 2026–2029 term. At the Italian Academy, he will work on nonlocal models arising in the applied sciences.
Website: www.nicodenitti.com
Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)
Algorithmic problems for the web economy
2026–2027: 12 months
I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Sapienza University of Rome. My research lies at the intersection of algorithms, machine learning, and economics, with a focus on developing rigorous theoretical frameworks to understand and optimize modern web platforms. In particular, my work focuses on online algorithms, especially stochastic variants of online matching, as well as learning algorithms for discrete choice models, including Random Utility Models and Multinomial Logit/Plackett–Luce models.
Beyond research, I have contributed to the academic community as a reviewer for leading conferences in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, including ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (2025, 2026), Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science conference (2025), International Conference on Machine Learning (2026), and AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2026).Website: mirkogiacchini.github.io
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy)
Hidden libraries: theoretical and socio-cultural approaches to book collections in Ancient Rome
2026–2027: Fall
Marta Perilli earned her BA and MA in Classics from the University of Florence and her PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore. A revised version of her doctoral dissertation is forthcoming as a monograph titled Giovane, Satira 15: Introduzione, Testo, Traduzione e Commento. She has held Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at both the University of Florence and the Scuola Normale Superiore and has also served as a Lecturer at the University of Florence, where she taught courses in Beginner Latin and Classical Dramaturgy. She was also a Visiting Researcher (with Fellowship) at the Fondation Hardt in Vandoeuvres (Geneva, Switzerland).
Her research focuses primarily on Latin literature of the Imperial period. She has presented her work at national and international seminars, workshops, and conferences, and has published several peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, as well as book chapters in edited volumes.
Her current research builds on the work carried out within the DaliB project (https://dalib.it) at the University of Florence and explores what literary texts can reveal about private libraries in ancient Rome. While Roman authors provide valuable insights into reading, writing, and the circulation of texts, key aspects remain unclear—such as where books were kept within domestic spaces, who had access to them, the contents of private collections, and the role of the personnel responsible for managing them and supporting literary production.
The project seeks to develop a new methodological framework for reconstructing private libraries in antiquity from a diverse and often fragmentary body of evidence, while also examining the socio-cultural conditions that shaped the circulation, management, and preservation of private book collections.
Focusing on Flavian and Trajanic Rome and on authors such as Martial, Statius, and Pliny the Younger, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of Latin literature, cultural history, and material culture. This evidence-based methodology aims to offer new insights into access to knowledge in antiquity and to provide fresh perspectives on book culture in ancient Rome.Centre Jean Pépin, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS; France)
Avicenna's political uses in Renaissance Italy
2026–2027: 12 months
Mali Caterina Alinejad Zanjani (PhD, École Normale Supérieure de Paris, 2025) is a philosopher and historian of thought whose research focuses on the circulation of medieval Arabic philosophy in early modern Europe. Her work lies at the intersection of psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and the history of textual transmission across linguistic and cultural boundaries. She is an associate member of the Centre Jean Pépin (CNRS–ENS).
At the Italian Academy, her current book project, Avicenna’s Political Uses in Renaissance Italy: From Individual to Collective Political Subjectivity, proposes a philosophical and historical study of the reception of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) in the sixteenth-century Italian peninsula. It examines how Avicenna’s theory of the soul was reinterpreted by Renaissance thinkers and explores its ethical and theological-political implications, tracing a movement from an individual ethical framework toward a collective political dimension. Following this shift, the project sheds light on the influence of Avicenna’s philosophy on the development of concepts such as collective imagination, political persuasion, and, more broadly, the formation of modern political subjectivity.
Her research has received support from the École Normale Supérieure, the École Française de Rome, the Vittore Branca International Center for the Study of Italian Culture (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice), the Graduate Program Translitterae–PSL, and the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples. She has also served as an adjunct lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the École Normale Supérieure.Website: https://umr8230.cnrs.fr/membres/mali-alinejad-zanjani/
Polytechnic University of Milan (Italy)
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Forms of crisis: architectural agency in times of climate collapse
2025–2026: Fall and Spring
Kevin Santus is an Italian architect, researcher, and educator. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano (2025), where he has served as Adjunct Professor and contributed to teaching and research activities in architecture and urban design.
He is co-founder of the architecture collective OFFCOLL*. His research focuses on architecture as a cultural and operative agency within conditions of climate collapse, with particular attention to fragile, rural, and post-industrial territories.
His work spans design research, pedagogy, editorial production, and curatorial practice, examining how architectural knowledge and practice can engage contemporary environmental and spatial crises.
Columbia University (USA)
Using polyamine dependency to target the cancer epigenome
2026–2027: 12 months
Originally from Italy, Ivano graduated in genetics and molecular biology at Sapienza University in Rome, where he worked to elucidate the role of epigenetics in mediating DNA damage repair in breast cancer. He then conducted doctoral studies at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, under the supervision of Prof. Luciano Di Croce, unveiling key organization principles of the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) as well as its role in the anteroposterior skeletal patterning of mice. After his PhD, he moved to Massachusetts to join the Lab of Prof. Oliver J. Rando, studying the inheritance of acquired traits in mice, with a focus on the packaging of the paternal genetic material into sperm. He joined the lab of Prof. Schvartzman in 2026 to work on the role of polyamines in cell proliferation and differentiation.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA; USA)
How terrain shapes forest climate and energy fluxes
2026–2027: 12 months
I hold a bachelor’s degree in physics from Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas in Bogotá, Colombia, and a master’s and PhD in physics from Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) in Brazil. My research focuses on micrometeorology and boundary layer processes, particularly the exchange of energy, mass, and momentum between the land surface, vegetation, and the atmosphere.
I began my academic career teaching physics and mathematics at primary and secondary schools in Bogotá before moving to Brazil to pursue scientific research. There, I joined the Micrometeorology Laboratory at UFSM and later held postdoctoral positions at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) and the University of São Paulo (USP) in the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics.
Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Air Resources Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA-ARL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, supported by the National Research Council (NRC) Associateship Program. I have over ten years of experience in research, teaching, and programming in R, working on topics ranging from atmospheric physics and micrometeorology to geosciences. My work combines field campaigns, multi-level flux measurements, and advanced data analysis to study forest–atmosphere interactions across diverse ecosystems. Looking forward, I aim to continue advancing our understanding of surface-atmosphere processes and their implications for energy and carbon dynamics.Website: https://mauriciocely.github.io/
Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Italy)
Constituent ecologies: social reproduction after the nonhuman turn
2026–2027: Spring
Ilaria Santoemma is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Dirpolis Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa), and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna and Roma Tre University. Her doctoral dissertation, “A Cartography of the Posthumanities: From Epistemology to Political Philosophy” (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 2022), won the Paola Bora Prize for the best thesis in Gender and Feminist Studies for the year 2023. Her research sits at the intersection of political philosophy, political epistemology, critical posthumanism, new materialism, political ecology and philosophy of technology. Recent publications include work on non-human agency, Social Reproduction Theory’s ecofeminist turn, and political technology.
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; USA)
Unveiling black hole scattering: analytic and causal structures in gravitational EFTs
2026–2027: 12 months
Giulia Isabella is a theoretical physicist working at the interface of particle physics and gravity. Before joining the Italian Academy, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Université Paris-Saclay and previously completed a joint master’s degree in high-energy physics at ETH Zurich and École Polytechnique.
A central aspect of her work is the use of general principles, such as causality and consistency, to constrain physical theories. She is particularly interested in applying these ideas to gravitational waves and black hole physics. Her recent work has uncovered new mathematical aspects of how gravity behaves in scattering processes and has led to high-precision results in determining black hole Love numbers, which describe how black holes respond to external perturbations.University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Narrative and materiality of Dante’s Divine Comedy
2026–2027: Fall
Francesco Marco Aresu earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature (with a secondary field in classical philology) from Harvard University. He graduated in letters from the Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia and has a master’s from Stanford University and Indiana University. His areas of expertise are medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies and history of the book, medieval and humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory.
He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, the manuscript tradition of Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the PetrArchive, associate editor for Heliotropia, and editor-in-chief of Bibliotheca Dantesca. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press.
Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.University of Parma (Italy)
Alexander Bodini Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Social peripersonal space and bodily self-disturbances in schizophrenia
2026–2027: Fall
Francesca Ferroni is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Parma. Her research focuses on how the brain generates the experience of the body in space—also known as peripersonal space—by integrating multisensory information.
Situated at the intersection of cognitive and clinical neuroscience, her research explores how multisensory information is combined to shape the boundaries of the bodily self. She is particularly interested in individual variability and in the plasticity of peripersonal space representations, examining how these processes adapt across contexts and differ across individuals.
A central line of her work addresses alterations of multisensory integration in schizophrenia. Through behavioral paradigms and neuroimaging approaches, she investigates how disruptions in the integration of sensory signals may contribute to disturbances of bodily self-awareness, offering new insights into the mechanisms underlying self-related disorders.
More broadly, her research aims to advance current theoretical models of body representation and to elucidate the neurobiological bases of the sense of self. By bridging neuroscience with clinical research, her work contributes to a deeper understanding of how embodied experience is constructed—and how it may become altered in psychopathology.University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” of Chieti–Pescara (Italy)
Alexander Bodini Fellow in the Application of AI Tools and Models in the Early Detection of Pancreatic Cancer
BAG3-dependent pathways in pancreatic cancer explored through AI and quantitative proteomics
2026-2027: Fall
Federica Di Marco is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies and Technology (CAST), University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” of Chieti–Pescara, Italy. She earned her PhD in Medical Biotechnologies in 2025 and specializes in mass spectrometry-based proteomics and multi-omics approaches for biomarker discovery and translational medicine. Her research integrates proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, and bioinformatics to investigate disease mechanisms and identify clinically relevant molecular signatures. During her doctoral training, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where she contributed to interdisciplinary projects at the interface of neuroscience, immunology, and omics sciences. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications and has received awards from both the Italian and European proteomics communities. At the Italian Academy, she will explore the integration of artificial intelligence and proteomics for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, with the goal of developing innovative strategies for biomarker discovery and precision oncology.
University of Parma (Italy)
Linking latent factors to functional subnetworks in the monkey motor cortex
2026–2027: Fall
I am a researcher in neuroscience studying how the brain controls actions in natural contexts. I trained in physics at the University of Parma, where I developed a strong interest in data analysis and complex systems. I then moved into neuroscience and completed my PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Parma, where I studied how single neurons in the macaque premotor cortex encode both executed and observed actions.
After my PhD, I held postdoctoral positions at the National Research Council of Italy, focusing on the analysis of intracranial EEG recordings in humans to investigate the neural basis of tactile awareness. I am currently a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Parma, where I apply machine learning and computational models to study how populations of neurons in the primate premotor cortex encode actions under naturalistic conditions, while the monkey moves freely in the environment.Website: https://boninilab.unipr.it/it/members/davide-albertini/267/
Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne University (France)
History of genetics and its social implications
2026–2027: Spring
Carole Reynaud-Paligot is a historian. After studying political science, she devoted her early research to the politicization of the artistic and literary avant-gardes (anarchism, neo-impressionism, and surrealism). Then, she carried out a detailed investigation into the racial culture that had spread widely in France (19th–20th centuries) and throughout Western societies.
She has published several books including: Parcours politique des surréalistes 1919–1969 (CNRS éditions, 1994, 2025), La République raciale. Une histoire 1860–1940 (2021 PUF Quadrige), De l’identité nationale. Science, race et politique en Europe et aux Etats-Unis (PUF, 2011), L’Ecole aux colonies entre racialisation et mission civilisatrice (Champ Vallon, 2020).
With geneticist Evelyne Heyer, she was scientific co-curator of the exhibition “Nous et les Autres. From prejudice to racism” at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, which is still touring France and abroad. With artist Ismaël Méziane, they published a graphic novel Comment devient-on raciste? (Casterman).Website: centrehistoire19esiecle.pantheonsorbonne.fr/carole-reynaud-paligot
Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
Borderland modernities in the Adriatic: women, art and institutions from the Habsburgs to the Italian Fascists, 1900–1939
2026–2027: Spring
Ana is an art historian and curator specializing in early twentieth-century European avant-garde and modernist art. She studied art history and English language and literature at the University of Rijeka, where she completed both her BA and MA degrees. In 2022, she completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London with a thesis titled “D’Annunzio’s Futurists: Fiume from 1914 to 1934”, supported by a Courtauld Scholarship and a Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England award. During and after her doctorate, she combined research, teaching, and curatorial work, holding teaching posts at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Northwestern Polytechnic in Canada. From 2023, she worked as Senior Research Officer at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in London, where she continues as a consultant and recently curated the exhibition “Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl” (2026). Until December 2026, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), where she was working on her first book, From Habsburg Corpus Separatum to Imperial Afterlives: Visual Politics and Art in Fiume. Her research has appeared in journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues, including International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Peristil, and Immediations.
Her time at the Italian Academy will be dedicated to developing a new research project on women artists and their position within art institutions and spaces in the port cities of Fiume (Rijeka), Capodistria (Koper), and Trieste during the first half of the twentieth century, as these towns moved through the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, geopolitical ambiguity, paramilitary occupation, and the formation of new nation-states.University of Turin (Italy)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
In others’ hands: retouching and manipulating works on paper in Early Modern Europe
2026–2027: Fall
Alice Ottazzi is an art historian specialized in the history of drawing and printmaking in the Early Modern period. Her scholarship explores the artistic and epistemological agency of graphic arts and connects it with art theory, material studies, and the history of ideas and knowledge. In her work, she examines the circulation of objects, people, and ideas with a particular focus on Great Britain, France, and Italy. She is interested in how the mechanisms of mobility, migration, trading, collecting, and reception shaped the visual and material entanglements of artistic production, the afterlives of works of art, and art theory.
She received her PhD in art history from the University of Turin and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, and her thesis won the Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis (2020). She was post-doctoral fellow at University Paris Nanterre (2022–2024), at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2024) and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut – Max-Planck-Institut of Florence (2025). She also taught at the universities of Aix–Marseille, Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne and Franche–Comté, and she has been collaborating with the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome).
Her book Trésors d’une île. La ricezione della scuola inglese a Parigi nel XVIII secolo was published in 2024 (Polistampa) with the support of the Tavolozza Foundation.Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Cultivating change: Bartram’s Garden, invasive species, and the environmental history of the Mid-Atlantic
2026–2027: 12 months
Alexandria Mitchem Hansen is an archaeologist and researcher whose work investigates the intersections of natural history, botanical science, and environmental change. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University; her dissertation, “‘Everything in ye universe in thair own nature’: An Archaeology of Natural History at Bartram’s Garden,” examined Philadelphia’s most prominent 18th-century botanical garden as a dynamic ecological and conceptual space. Her research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Explorers Club, and the Penn Museum.
Moving beyond traditional human-centric records, Alexandria utilizes “ecological archives”—including foraging animal behaviors and field weed naturalization—to understand how historic landscapes were shaped by diverse biological actors. As a Fellow at the Italian Academy, she will expand this work through sediment coring and palynological analysis, offering new insights into the relationship between historic horticulture and Mid-Atlantic environmental shifts. Alexandria is also a dedicated educator committed to public scholarship, having developed numerous public-facing tours and lectures to bring archaeological research to broader audiences.
