UNESCO Chair 
Water, Heritage and Sustainable Development

Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and a professor of historical epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage / Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His main areas of inquiry are Anthropocene philosophy, the material history of science in the longue durée, the cultural history of cosmology and the politics of epistemology. He is the author of Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies (2019). He co-edited, with C. Baldacci, S. Bassi and L. De Capitani, Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide (2022) and is the editor of two journal special issues on geoanthropology: *with T. Asmussen, Early Modern Geological Agency, in Earth Science History 39/2 (2020); *with R. Garau and G. Rispoli, Historical Geoanthropology, in the Journal for the Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 11/22 (2022). He is the principal investigator of the FARE project EarlyGeoPraxis, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. He also leads the Max Planck Partner Group in Venice The Water City on Anthropocene Venice and the Waterscapes Unit at THE NEW INSTITUTE CENTRE for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) in Venice.

Cristina Baldacci is an Associate Professor in History of Contemporary Art at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she is also affiliated with THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE). At NICHE she is the PI of the Ecological Art Practices research cluster. Her research interests focus on archiving and collecting as art practices; reenactment and other ‘re-’ strategies in contemporary arts and theory; art and Climate Change; archives and the Anthropocene – all topics on which she has extensively published (see, among others, the monograph Archivi impossibili: Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea, 2016; the co-edited volumes Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, 2022; On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, 2022; the co-edited double issue of "Holotipus" journal on Archiving the Anthropocene: New Taxonomies Between Art and Science, 2023-2024). She is currently doing research for a new book on how to rethink (cultural and natural) archives and systems of classification, between art and science, in relation to the urgent questions raised by the environmental crisis.
Another article will be published soon: Baldacci, C. (2023), “An Archipelago of Ecological Care: Venice, Its Lagoon, and Contemporary Art", Lagooscapes. The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, 3(2), [1-14].

Erasmo Castellani is a research fellow at Ca' Foscari University, working on the Cariplo foundation project: 'The Emergence of Risk Society: Managing Danger and Uncertainty in Early Modern Venice.' He earned his PhD in History at Duke University, working on questions of empires, sovereignty and subjecthood in the Early Modern Mediterranean. His prior experience includes work on legal anthropology, practices of governance, political communication, and epistemic practices in Venice and its territories between the 16th and the 19th centuries through extensive archival research in Italy, Greece, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and American collections. He has worked on digital humanities projects, organizing a   database of Venetian petitions (Voices from Istria, co-sponsored by Ca' Foscari and Primorska University, Koper) and collaborating with the Venice Interactive Visual Atlas (VIVA) project at Duke. His current research focuses on the interplay of social micro-management with the imperial politics of the Venetian Republic. In his book project, "The Power that Restrains: Negotiating Sovereignty Through Petitions in the Venetian Stato da Mar," he argues that Venetian imperial sovereignty was actually made by a myriad of particular interests that express the geopolitical complexities of Venice’s diverse subject populations. 

Xenia Chiaramonte is a jurist and socio-legal scholar. She has mainly worked on environmental struggles and legal tools both from the perspective of a critique of penal governmentality of dissent and for the advancement of a legal imagination up to new social needs and contemporary climate breakdown. She’s the author of Governare il conflitto: la criminalizzazione del movimento No Tav [ITA] (Milan, 2019). She has extensively published in international journals, and her most recent lines of research delve into new forms of social institutions, a reading of praxis beyond the agency typical of neo-materialist positions, and a critique of the use of nature in contemporary ecological discourse. Presently, Xenia holds the position of a postdoctoral researcher in the FARE project. She is also an affiliated fellow at ICI BERLIN, where she is co-editing the forthcoming book Reducing Climate/Legal Imagination for Gaia with Sarath Jakka. This year marks the opening of the summer school she co-curates entitled Politiche della biodiversità funded by the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies.

Pietro Consolandi is a researcher and artist based in the lagoon of Venice, where he co-founded the Barena Bianca collective in 2018. He is a research fellow at NICHE (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), where he studies the Rights of Nature legal framework and its potential application for Venice, also in concert with other European water bodies, such as the Mar Menor. He is OCEAN / UNI Research Lead at TBA21–Academy, having been involved with the foundation since 2020 after taking part in the first Ocean Fellowship. 

Giovanni Fava is PhD candidate in Philosophy at University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, where he is working on a project devoted to the philosophical and epistemological aspect of the concept of the Anthropocene while trying to develop its political implications. His research deals with the problems of multitemporality, agency, the relationship between human and natural history, and eco-marxism. Giovanni’s interests span the philosophy of nature, political ecology, cultural anthropology, and contemporary French philosophy, with special reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, of which he is – together with Riccardo Valenti – Italian translator (L’istituzione, la passività. Note del Corso al Collège de France, 1954-1955, Mimesis, Milano-Udine, 2023). 

Giulia Gandolfi is a PhD student at Cà Foscari University in Venice and at University Panthéon Sorbonne in Paris. During her studies in Venice, as part of a research group in political epistemology, she focused on the emergence of science from the historical context of human praxis, especially in medical areas. In Paris, as a member of the HIPHIMO group, her work is centered on Georges Canguilhem’s concept of vital normativity. Her research on Canguilhem analyzes the idea of knowledge production in medicine and biology as a pivotal moment for the biopolitical management of health.

Corinna Guerra is Assistant Professor in History of Science and Technology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches “Philosophy and Politics of Life and the Environment” and she is Associate Researcher of the Laboratoire d’Excellence HASTEC (History and Anthropology of Knowledge,Technologies and Beliefs), France and the GHDSO at the Paris-Saclay University. Her research focus is on the chemistry of the 18th century, natural disasters and the relationship between geochemical peculiarities of a territory and the evolution of scientific disciplines. Her first book Lavoisier e Parthenope (Naples 2017) was awarded the Prize for Young Historians by the International Academy of the History of Science. She has been appointed among the 100 Italian (women) Experts for the History and Philosophy Area 100esperte.it [ITA].

Heiner Krellig is an art historian, who has obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Wolters at the Institut für Kunstwissenschaft of Technische Universität Berlin with a thesis on Venetian veduta painting, entitled Menschen in der Stadt. Darstellungen städtischen Lebens auf venezianischen Veduten. After having obtained scholarships at the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig/Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, as well as from the DAAD, he was researcher of the National Inventory Research Project (NIRP) at Glasgow Museums, and he has taught History of Art, History of Fashion, Photography and Graphic Arts at LetteVerein – Fachschule für Mode- Foto-, Grafikdesign, Berlin, in the lifelong-learning program of Freie Universität Berlin, and later at Universität Bamberg. He has collaborated with various international museum institutions, especially the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin Brandenburg (Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation). Besides his specialisation in Venetian art history, he has always nourished a profound interest in the history of gardens and the theory of conservation of monuments, as well as gardens and nature. Indeed, in 2013–2014, he was the Project Manager of the pioneering, transdisciplinary research project Historische Gärten im Klimawandel/Historic Gardens and Climate Change, funded by the German BUND e. V. (Friends of the Earth Germany). Since 2021 he is collaborating to the Max Planck Partner Group The Water City - Political Epistemology of Hydrogeological Practice.

Francesca Melina is a PhD student in the Sustainable Development and Climate Change joint program between IUSS Pavia and Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She is working on a project that considers the possibility of seeing art as a trans/multidisciplinary reflexive practice that acts directly on the social fabric and produces political, epistemological and gnoseological transformations. Thus, conceived as a (collective) practice that could produce commons and promote an ethics of proximity and care in relation to issues of global warming. Francesca is interested in the construction of a phenomenology of art practice that investigates the relationship between art and capitalism, art and science, and art and politics, with a further attention to ethics.

Justas Patkauskas is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of speculative philosophy, concept history, and social theory. Working in the tradition of historical epistemology, he is broadly concerned with the ontology and epistemology of knowledge-making in modernity. His research interests include immanence theory, knowledge ecosystems, and the Anthropocene. Specific topics concern biopolitics, cybernetics and Earth system science.

Omar Rodríguez is a historian and philosopher of science interested in the introduction and development of European thought, mainly Renaissance humanism, in the Ibero-American multicultural world. More specifically, he recovers the complex interrelationships between natural, religious and political notions in the conceptualization of the skies and territories in the Americas, especially in New Spain. At the same time, he has studied the history of civil engineering in Mexico, analysing the different interests behind public works. Currently, his research focuses on the study of the particularities of knowledge and practices in multicultural societies and its implications for their environments. He has recently written Transformation and Persistence of the Basin-Valley of Mexico in the 16th and 17th Centuries. He collaborates with the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) and with the Water City Project. The Political Epistemology of Hydrogeological Praxis. He is beginning a postdoctoral fellowship on The Dispute for the Environment in the Valley of Mexico within the FARE project EarlyGeoPraxis in Ca' Foscari University in Venice.

Krešimir Vuković obtained a doctorate in Classics at the University of Oxford. He was Lecturer at Oxford’s Faculty of Classics, Rome Fellow of the British School at Rome and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at LMU Munich. He is strongly interested in environmental humanities and ecocriticism and ways in which they can provide valuable lessons in current global crises. At NICHE, he is studying the fluvial environment of the Venetian lagoon in late antiquity and writing a book entitled The Living Streams: Rivers as More-than-Human Entities in the Ancient World for the series Cambridge Elements in Environmental Humanities (Cambridge University Press). He is also a specialist in Roman religion and mythology and has published widely on these topics in journals and edited volumes (OUP, CUP). He has recently published the book Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives (Walter de Gruyter, 2023) on the role of non-human animals in Rome’s most enduring festival.