People

Shaul Bassi
Professor of English and Environmental Humanities, Dept. of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies

Enrica De Cian
Professor in Environmental Economics, Dept.of Economics, ERC Starting Grant grantee with the project ENERGYA – Energy use for Adaptation

David Gentilcore
Professor of Early Modern History and PI of the European Research Council advanced grant The Water Cultures of Italy, 1500-1900 (grant agreement 833834), Dept. of Humanities

Francesco Gonella
Professor of Physics, Dept. of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems

Pietro Daniel Omodeo
Cultural Historian of Science and Professor of Historical Epistemology,  PI of the European Research Council consolidator project "Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe" (grant agreement 725883.)  

Roberta Raffaetà
Deputy director
PI of the European Research Council advanced grant HealthXCross (grant agreement GA n. 949742), Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Dept. of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage

Fabiana Zollo
Head of the Laboratory of Data Science for Society, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics

Una Chaudhuri
Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University

Sarah Davies
Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the University of Vienna

Anne Rademacher
Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University

Dr. Anna Katsman (External member)
Academic Director THE NEW INSTITUTE

Cristina Baldacci
Associate Professor in History of Contemporary Art, Dept. of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage

Eric Bou Maqueda
Full Professor of Iberian Studies at the Dept. of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies

Helen Foxhall Forbes
Professor of Medieval History at the Dept. of Humanities

Steen Rasmussen
Professor in Physics at University of Southern Denmark and Director of the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT)

Massimo Warglien
Full Professor at the Dept. of Management

Pietro Consolandi
Research Fellow

Researcher, artist, and co-founder of Barena Bianca. His research investigates the interconnection between human beings, their more-than-human neighbours and the ecosystems they belong to, from a political, ecological and sentimental point of view. Within NICHE he studies the possibility of implementing Rights of Nature in the Lagoon of Venice, also joining forces with other European and global initiatives working towards the same scope.

Benedetta Cotta
Research Fellow

Her current research focuses on "sustainable welfare" and the emergence of eco-social policies at European, national and local levels of governance.

Silvia Francescon
Research Fellow

Is an expert in international environmental law. Her research is aimed at exploring the radical adherence of deep ecology and eco-centrism to the Buddha's thought, and - consequently - to re-imagine and imprint into action the idea of rights from a biocentric rather than anthropocentric perspective.

Emiliano Guaraldo
Research Fellow

His current research focuses on "Waterscapes under Threat: New Approaches to Rivers in the Anthropocene"

Jacopo Scarin
Research Fellow

His current research project deals with the religiosity of the Chinese diaspora in Italy with a focus on the effects of COVID-19 on the religious practice of the Chinese Evangelicals in the Veneto region.

Krešimir Vuković
Research Fellow

K. 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 a 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.

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim is a Reader in the History Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her
research has dealt with the history of globalisation of medical knowledge, particularly along the Silk-Roads. Her recent book, ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters along the Silk Roads uses a number of case studies to illustrate how medical knowledge moved across cultural contact zones and spread across Eurasia. Next year she will take up a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton. During her time at NICHE she will explore some links between the history of global health and environmental humanities, and will work to extend research partnerships in support of future grant applications.

Andrea Pia
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science

Is completing the revisions on his book manuscript entitled Cutting the Massline: moving water and the political in rural China, forthcoming in the Water and Society series of John Hopkins University Press. The book, which covers almost a decade of research across various communities located on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, tracks China’s technocratic responses to the country’s climate crisis and explores the political possibilities opened by the global march toward a water-altered future. During his visiting, Andrea will also collect material for Justice after Carbon, his new research project about the internationalisation of the Chinese hydropower industry, and work to extend research partnerships in support of future grant applications.

Christoph Mauch
Director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society

Toxic Waters: Stories of a Wounded PlanetThis project comes out of a collaboration with Tallinn-based photographer Bernhard Lang who is known for his spectacular aerial photographs. Over the course of the last 20 years Lang has taken photos of ‘waters around the globe’: Industrial fish farms in Norway and the Philippines, irrigation plants in Kansas, wastewater from phosphate plants in Florida, polluted lagoons in the Baltic etc. Christof Mauch’s research will accompany, analyze and interpret Lang’s photography. His book-length study will be published with National Geographic Deutschland. Mauch will also work on a chapter titled “River City: Memphis Tennessee”; it looks at the Mississippi river as a source of life and death for people, flora and fauna in Memphis. 

Anna Lora-Wainwright
Professor of the Human Geography of China, University of Oxford

During her visiting scholarship at NICHE she worked on co-authored journal article titled ‘Becoming Citizens through Citizen Science in China’, to be submitted to Science, Technology and Human Values. The article outlines the various ways in which student-volunteers develop “transformative potentials” (Brombal 2020), outlining such potentials in relation to their growing awareness of rural water quality challenges, the scientific complexities of evaluating water quality and its effects on health, and their growing awareness of the complex socio-political contexts within which water governance unfolds. This scholarship aimed at contributing to current debates on the possibilities of citizen participation in China, but also, more broadly, to decolonising approaches to citizenship and participation.

Roberta D’Argenio
Executive financial officer

Barbara Del Mercato
Project manager

Giulia Brolese
Communications Officer

Beatriz Barbado Gutierrez
Administrative Officer

Alessandra Bonesso
Research facilitator