Lavinia MADDALUNO

I am a historian (Cambridge, History Faculty, PhD) and historian of science (Cambridge, HPS Department, MPhil) with a previous training in Philosophy (Pisa, BA and Master). My expertise is situated between the history of science and intellectual history, and my central research question concerns the role of scientific knowledge production in the realisation of ideas of state, wealth and society in Europe in the early modern period. My first book, under contract with the Voltaire Foundation. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (and forthcoming in autumn 2024) investigates how political economic ideas materialised in scientific practices in the Duchy of Milan between the time of enlightened reforms and the transition to the Napoleonic period. 

Besides my focus on the Enlightenment, which I have corroborated thanks to two postdoctoral fellowships, at the British School at Rome (2017-2018) and the Scaliger Institute in Leiden (2018), I have also developed an interest in the late Renaissance (especially the XVII century), which I could fully expand as assegnista di ricerca on a project on water-provisioning practices in Paris and Marseille led by Diego Carnevale at the Università Federico II in Naples. Further to this, I have held the first ever Warburg/I Tatti Fellowship (2019-2020), a joint fellowship between the Warburg Institute and Villa I Tatti, during which time I began to explore how medical knowledge regarding the quality of airs and waters was produced in relation to models of land management, and of rice and cheese production especially, in the Spanish Habsburg Duchy of Milan in the late Renaissance. In 2020-2021, I was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, where I had the opportunity to expand my research interests towards early modern global history. To this end, I have co-organised (with Roberta Biasillo and Maria Vittoria Comacchi) a two-days workshop (May 27th-28th) on Mobilities in Early Modern and Contemporary Mediterranean, held at the EUI, Florence, exploring mobilities patterns in the connected, expanded global space of the Mediterranean. More recently, I have been awarded a two-month fellowship, co-funded between the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Instituto Einaudi, to work on ersatz cultures and rice in eighteenth-century France and Italy. Overall, I have co-organised nine international conferences and panels/workshops (among which the International Society for Intellectual History Conference and The Water Cultures of Italy Conference), won grants to organise two history of science workshops at CRASSH in Cambridge (in 2016 and early 2023), and have been invited to speak at conferences and workshops in the UK, Italy, Switzerland, the USA, France and Finland seventeen times since 2019. I have served as reviewer for articles in nine journals, from Italy, France and the UK, and for competitive founding bodies such as the National Science Foundation (USA). From 2012 to 2022, I have been book review editor for the History of Science journal Nuncius (Brill). 

In terms of forthcoming publications, I am working towards an edited volume on the history of rice in the Mediterranean (with Rachele Scuro), a monographic section on Mediterranean mobilities for Società e Storia (with Roberta Biasillo and Vittoria Comacchi) and a special issue on Water Knowledge for Notes and Records of the Royal Society (with Davide Martino and Giacomo Savani). 

As prior teaching experience, I have acted as teaching assistant in the Global Commodities course led by Giorgio Riello and Alexandre Etkind, and the seminar Contagion: a Corona History course organised by Stephane Van Damme and Giancarlo Casale, both at the EUI. Both courses were for PhD students and were structured as a mix of seminars/paper discussions and short lectures by guest speakers. At the EUI, I have also earned the Teacher Training Certificate, equivalent to 3 ECTS. I have also given occasional seminars/lectures for undergraduate and master students at Cambridge (Material culture seminar organised by Melissa Calaresu), Pisa (History of Medicine course by Mauro Capocci), Bologna (Gloc, in the global history course led by Carlo Taviani), the Università per Stranieri in Perugia (Antonio Allegra's Philosophy of Food course), and University of Florence (in Renato Pasta's Early modern History course).