Eleonora DELFINO

Position
Research contract
E-mail
eleonora.delfino@unive.it
Academic discipline
Latin Language and Literature [LATI-01/A]
Website
www.unive.it/people/eleonora.delfino (personal record)
Office
Department of Humanities
Website: https://www.unive.it/dep.humanities
Where: Malcanton Marcorà

Eleonora Delfino (1994) studied at Sapienza University of Rome, where she obtained a Bachelor's degree in Humanities and a Master's degree in Linguistics. In 2023, she was awarded a PhD in Linguistics from the joint doctoral programme of Roma Tre University and Sapienza University of Rome, defending a dissertation entitled Prehistory of the Alternating Neuter Gender in Medieval Italo-Romance. During her doctoral studies, she undertook research and training periods at the Romanisches Seminar of the University of Zurich.

From March 2024 to August 2025, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Udine within the framework of the PNRR-funded project Textual Data and Tools for Coreference Resolution in Latin (CorefLat), carried out in collaboration with the CIRCSE research centre of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. As part of this project, she was involved in the development of linguistic resources for coreference resolution in Latin texts. 

Since July 2026, she has been a research contractor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice within the ERC-funded project Digital Latin Dialectology (DiLaDi): Tracing Linguistic Variation in the Light of Ancient and Early Medieval Sources, directed by Béla Adamik. Within the project, she is involved in the collection and annotation of linguistic data using the LLDB.

Her research interests lie primarily in the field of Italian historical linguistics and focus on the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, with particular emphasis on Italian. Within this framework, she has investigated morphosyntactic variation between Latin and the emerging vernaculars, the development of the neuter gender in Medieval Italo-Romance and in documentary Latin from Italy, as well as the linguistic analysis of Medieval Latin and Romance textual corpora. In recent years, she has also developed interests in the areas of Digital Humanities and computational linguistics applied to the study of Latin. She has contributed to the Atlante Grammaticale della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (AGLIO).

She has presented papers and posters at national and international conferences and is the author of scholarly publications in national and international journals and edited volumes on historical linguistics, Romance philology, and computational approaches to Latin.

Alongside her research activities, she has gained extensive teaching experience. Since 2023, she has held a permanent position teaching Latin and Italian language and literature at upper-secondary school level. She holds the CEDILS certification in teaching Italian as a foreign language, awarded by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Since 2024, she has also collaborated with the Progetto Lingua Italiana Dante Alighieri (PLIDA) of the Dante Alighieri Society as an item writer for the Italian as a Foreign Language certification examinations.