Department of
Humanities

News

Death in Trieste: Podcast on Winckelmann on BBC Radio 3

When working at Ca’ Foscari in Autumn 2022 as a visiting fellow at the Venice Centre for Digital & Public Humanities Seán Williams has created a Podcast in five episodes on the archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his death in Trieste. Dr Williams is Senior Lecturer in German and European Literature and History at the University of Sheffield (UK). The Podcast focuses on the events connected with the murder and the ways it has been told over the centuries. All the episodes have been broadcasted in late May 2023 and are now published online in the BBC website, freely accessible to everyone.

ERC: Ca' Foscari wins 4 "Consolidator Grants", the best result in Italy

Ca’ Foscari has won 4 of the 21 “Consolidator Grants” awarded to Italian institutions by the European Research Council of the European Commission. The subject areas of the projects will range from visual anthropology in South America and the history of Artificial Intelligence to innovative methods to analyse deep ice in Antarctica and communication in the Ancient Near East.

Disclosing Collections: Studies, Catalogues and Data in the Arts and the Humanities

Inspired by the process of scientific analysis and contextual public disclosure of collected materials in the wider Humanities, this academic book series aims at setting a new standard in producing catalogues, inventories, indexes, collection displays, data sets, and item lists. The series is grounded on the idea of both mapping and disclosing unprecedented territories, which are then left with infrastructures that allow them to be available to the research community and the wider public. 

AI to aid historians in restoring, placing and dating ancient texts

Ithaca is the first deep neural network that can aid historians in restoring the text of damaged inscriptions and in identifying their original location and date. Ithaca is the result of the PithyaPlus project of Marie Curie Fellow Thea Sommerschield, and it has been published in Nature.

Welcome message from Giovanni Vian, Director of the Department

“We study the past and merge the humanities with new digital technologies. We focus on the Mediterranean and Near East areas.
Venice is, by nature, a special observation point.”

Giovanni Vian,
Director of the Department of Humanities

Agenda

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Our research

Research areas

The Department of Humanities is an innovative research and development centre that operates in various branches of the humanities, such as history, archaeology, the science of texts and written documents, linguistics, classical literature, Italian literature, cultural and social anthropology, and art history from ancient to contemporary art.

The Department is developing projects and activities in the digital humanities (DH), innovative tools which integrate traditional research and teaching methods. Numerous national and international research projects are financed at the Department every year and contribute to the important scientific achievements of its scientific community.

The Department’s centres and laboratories promote, organise and coordinate its research and training activities. The Department is involved in the interdisciplinary research network Research for Global Challenges.

Research projects
PURA - PURism in Antiquity: theories of language in Greek atticist lexica and their legacy

Researcher: Olga Tribulato;
Lenght: 60 months (31/12/2025)

Water Cultures - The Water Cultures of Italy (1500-1900)

Researcher: David Gentilcore;
Lenght: 60 months (until October 2024)

Publications

The Department of Humanities promotes the dissemination of its research through contributions to journals, books, and conference proceedings.