Elisa D'ARGENIO

Elisa D’Argenio (b. 1986) studied at the University of Naples “Federico II”, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in Modern Literature in 2008, a master's degree in Modern Philology in 2012, and a PhD in Modern Philology in 2017, with a dissertation in General Linguistics devoted to the legal lexicon of the Langobard laws.

Her research interests lie in historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics, with particular reference to Late and Medieval Latin, documentary sources from medieval Italy, and digital humanities.

She has held post-doctoral research fellowships at the Universities of Naples “Federico II”, Verona and Bergamo, working on research projects funded under the Italian PRIN programme. Her research has focused on the Leges Langobardorum, medieval notarial documents, Ravenna papyri, and the digitalisation and linguistic annotation of texts for the Archivio della Latinità Italiana del Medioevo (ALIM).

Since 2023 she has collaborated on the ERC project Digital Latin Dialectology (DiLaDi): Tracing Linguistic Variation in the Light of Ancient and Early Medieval Sources (https://pric.unive.it/projects/diladi/home), directed by Béla Adamik. Since May 2025 she has been a fixed-term researcher, type A, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice within the same project. Her work for DiLaDi includes: i) dialectological research on Latin parchment documents published in the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores; ii) the collection and annotation of linguistic data through the LLDB database (https://lldb.elte.hu/); iii) the digital preparation of texts for data extraction and analysis.

She has acquired teaching experience both at university and school level. She has taught “Introduction to Linguistics” and “Ethnolinguistics” as an adjunct professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca and, for several years, has contributed to teaching activities, seminars, and practical classes in General Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University of Naples “Federico II”. In the 2024/2025 school year, after passing the 2023 national competitive examination for permanent teaching positions, she taught Italian, history, and geography in lower secondary school. Since the 2025/2026 academic year, she has taught “Principles of Linguistics - Practice” at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the module “Inclusive Language” within the Master’s programme “Media, languages and communication in a global world (China, Japan, Arab World)” at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

She has developed strong technical skills in digital humanities applied to historical linguistics, especially in the construction and management of textual corpora and in the linguistic encoding and annotation of documentary sources in TEI-XML. She has advanced experience in the use of the lexicographic software GATTO (Gestione degli Archivi Testuali del Tesoro delle Origini, Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano). In collaboration with Mariafrancesca Giuliani and Giovanni Abete, she developed the GeoDocuM project (Geografie Documentarie Meridionali), devoted to the digital cartographic representation of early medieval documentary vocabulary from southern Italy.

She has also collaborated in the creation of small multimedia museums, both virtual and physical, aimed at promoting the linguistic and ethnographic heritage of the dialects of Campania Region.

She is the author of articles published mainly in Class A academic journals and of essays in national and international edited volumes. She is the co-editor of the volumes Sistemi, norme, scritture. La lingua delle più antiche carte cavensi (Giannini, 2017, with Rosanna Sornicola and Paolo Greco) and Alla conquista del codice scritto. La lingua delle leggi longobarde e visigotiche (De Gruyter, forthcoming, with Rosanna Sornicola).

She has presented papers at national and international conferences, including the congresses of the Société de Linguistique Romane (Congrès de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, CILPR) and of the Comité international pour l’étude du latin vulgaire et tardif (International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin, Latin vulgaire – latin tardif).

She is a member of the Società Italiana di Glottologia, by co-optation, and of the Société de Linguistique Romane.