Meet our Young Researchers (PNRR) 
Research results

The 2022 and 2024 PNRR Young Researchers calls support young researchers who chose Italian Universitiesy or Research Bodies as their Host Institution where to implement their own projects.

Specifically, the two calls funded one of the following categories:

• MSCA Grantees: researchers who won Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships. The goal is to allow them to consolidate their research activity through a new project that is complementary and consequential to the one previously funded by the European Union.
• Seal of Excellence Holders: researchers whose projects were rated as excellent in MSCA calls, but were not funded due to EU budget limits. These calls fund such projects to ensure that high-quality international research is not lost.

In both cases, the researchers selected are recruited in non-tenured assistant professor positions pursuant  art. 24, paragraph 3, letter a), of the Law of 30 December 2010, n. 240.

Funded projects

2024 PNRR Young Researchers call - Funded projects

Francesca Sofia Alexandratos

Transactional life and vulnerability. A bio-social account of vulnerability for the critique of
intersectional social pathologies

Social movements are progressively converging around the critical concept of vulnerability, interpreting the environmental crisis, gender and racial oppressions, and class inequalities as intersected forms of vulnerability. An urgent task of social philosophy is thus to outline a concept of vulnerability for the critique of these intersectional social pathologies. This concept must be sufficiently broad to account for the common core of social groups’ vulnerabilities and sufficiently elastic to differentiate their specific forms of vulnerability for developing power-free intersectional experiences of vulnerability and projects of social transformation.
Accordingly, the project aims at outlining a bio-social account of vulnerability through early American pragmatism’s legacy.
Firstly, I will provide social philosophy with a unified concept of vulnerability as “transactional life”, to distinguish between different species of vulnerability according to the plural dimensions of nature, i.e., inorganic, organic, and human nature, and account for the multiple socio-historical forms of human vulnerability.
Secondly, I will provide a bio-social, continuous and multi-layered account of power to conceive social pathologies as the results of intersected forms of power-over vulnerability as transactional life, linking social transformation to interdependent dimensions of intervention. Finally, I will investigate some specificities of human vulnerability in light of the habitual and enlanguaged dimension of human sensibility to the external environment, to consider the intersubjective preconditions that are necessary to develop power-free intersectional experiences of vulnerabilit

Efe Murat Balikcioglu

In Defense of Philosophy: Verifying Causes, Nature, and the Universe in Early Modern Ottoman Scholarship

The CAUSALITYISLAM project aims at investigating the nature of causal analysis in medieval and early modern Islamic philosophy and science, by assaying the works of certain fifteenth-century Ottoman philosopher such as Hocazāde, Mü’eyyedzāde, ‘Alī Qushjī and İbn Kemāl, who defended the strict categories of cause and effect in analyzing celestial and physical worlds by formulating a set of causes resorting to necessity, efficacy, and finality. These scientific-minded philosophers went against the conservative Muslim interpreters of the day who rejected such analytic categories in favor of a fatalistic account of the universe solely based on God’s absolute free will.
The project intends to provide a rich, prosopographical account of the Muslim defenders of causation theory against the fatalistic interpretations of Sharia, especially focusing on a previously unacknowledged group of Ottoman philosophers who placed cause and effect above the literalist interpretations of the Holy Qur’an. My historical narrative will build on previously unedited manuscripts from medieval Persia and North Africa to Asia Minor and the Balkans, with the aim of demonstrating the rigor of rational knowledge production in the early Ottoman Empire—despite certain prevailing accounts of religious bigotry and fundamentalism from the period.
This project engages in research that challenges existing periodizations of Eurocentric world history and contributes to rethinking the geographies and periods that shaped the understanding of past developments in medieval philosophy and science. The scientific achievements of Renaissance Europe have occupied a central part in the current historiography about the rise of Western science and culture and this project will demonstrate that the contemporaneous achievements of Ottoman scholars were more diverse than previously thought.

Silvia Boraso

WHRAP - Writing Haiti. Racialized representations of Haiti in the Francophone Atlantic Press (1801-1915)

The project WHRAP proposes a new approach to the problem of racial representations of Haitians through the analysis of media Atlantic discourse in the 19th century. In particular, I will consider articles and chronicles published in Francophone newspapers and periodicals of four Atlantic regions – Quebec, Louisiana, the French Antilles, and the French Guyana – in the period 1801-1915. The objective is to examine how Haiti and Haitians were presented in journalistic discourse to define a broader semantics of race that will help map the different positions of these four specific Francophone realities on social and political issues such as slavery, racism, and colonialism, notions that did not necessarily overlap in the 19th century.
Rethinking the visibility of the newly funded Republic of Haiti (1804) – the second colony of the American continent to obtain independence and the first Black Republic of the world – in journals, newspapers, and periodicals of the time and examining the terms in which it was represented will reframe the problem of slavery and the notion of race in the Francophone (French-speaking) Atlantic.
The Atlantic is an excellent observatory of the different geographical, political and cultural realities that stemmed from the ancient colonies of the French empire (Louisiana and Quebec), and of the colonial rhetoric that impinged on areas that were still under its control (French Antilles and Guyana). The project hypothesis is that the representation of Haiti and Haitian people in the press was not simply racialized, but was mainly influenced by historical and economic factors specific to each Francophone community (e.g. the defense of a Francophone and Catholic identity in Quebec; the presence of ancient Saint-Domingue colonizers and colonized in Louisiana; the abolition of slavery by France in the French Antilles and Guyana) and varied according to the evolution of local as well as of international 19th-century politics. The analysis of the collected newspapers, journals, and periodicals will allow me to verify whether there was a correlation between the racialization of journalistic discourse on Haiti and the way the notion of race was constructed. If confirmed,
the forms of discrimination suffered from Haiti and Haitians will prove a useful and original litmus test of the ways in which slavery and race were perceived in the Francophone Atlantic.
The comparative study of 19th-century political, economic, and cultural relationships between Haiti and the other four Francophone realities will be accompanied by a rigorous linguistic, quantitative analysis of the sources that will not only allow me to investigate a rich, though uninvestigated corpus, but that will also enable me to define and categorize – through measurable, objective criteria (conceptual research and computational analysis) – semantic strategies of racial discrimination in 19th-century Atlantic.

Eugenia Diegoli

Beyond words: what language can tell us about self-evaluative emotions and the ideologies that motivate them

The project investigates and compares the language of self-evaluative emotions (SELFEE) in standard Japanese and British English written online communication. The analysis is meaningful because recurrent patterns of language use are indicative of cultural and conceptual tendencies in profiling emotions, with implications for well-being. The focus is on self-evaluative emotions (more specifically, shame, guilt and embarrassment), defined here as negatively valenced inner states typically experienced in interpersonal contexts and involving a negative evaluation of the self. Because such (d)evaluation is based on normative standards that a given group or community holds as appropriate, self-evaluative emotions are acquired, hence are intrinsically social.
The data is retrieved from two popular online platforms (Hatsugen Komachi and Mumsnet) which are female-oriented parenting websites. These are the tertia comparationis that allow me to
study how users of these platforms frame and process self-evaluative emotions in similar, hence comparable, contexts. The online nature of the data is examined as part of the communicative process.
Methodologically, the topic of the language of emotions requires an interdisciplinary approach. The methods used here come mainly from areas within linguistics (corpus linguistics, NLP, discourse analysis), but theoretical notions from psychology, philosophy of emotions and sociology are also employed. This hybrid approach will greatly improve my future prospects and the real-world impact of my research. Expected outcomes include a repeatable and replicable method that can detect expressions of emotions in texts across languages; an empirical and measurable lexical (and cognitive) profile of self-evaluative emotions in the form of overlapping semantic fields; and a data-driven taxonomy of who feels what and why, which takes into account gendered roles and repertoires and clarifies the ideological nature of self-evaluative emotions.

Lilian Regina Goncalves Diniz

CONVERSIO

Cultural clashes, encounters and exchanges are part and parcel of what makes us humans. Throughout the history of humanity, uncountable encounters are documented, and even though these exchanges are not always equal in terms of the consequences they have for the groups involved, it is certain that they all mutually influence each other, a process that brings about change. Religious conversion is one example of such encounters and exchanges, in which an old faith and world view must be substituted by a new one. The process of religious conversion can be highly diverse, but one feature remains the same: a converter that changes from one religion to another will inevitably be also an apostate. Thus, conversion and apostasy are two sides of the same coin.
CONVERSIO will study the complex phenomenon of religious conversion and apostasy in Early Medieval Iberia, a region that offers an interesting case study because it witnessed multiple waves of migrations and conversions across its history. CONVERSIO puts contemporary discussions of culture clashes and the role of religion in society into historical context through a thorough reappraisal of earlier episodes of momentous religious change. This project aims to analyse Christian Latin sources relating to the conversion and apostasy of other peoples to Christianity and vice-versa, focusing on the interaction between Christians, Jews and Muslims from the 5th to the 9th century in Early medieval Iberia during the Visigothic Kingdom and the first period of Islamic domination.

Francesco Eugenio Iannuzzi

Why-so-poor? The social determinants of low-wage labour in the Italian tourism industry

Since the 1980s, tourism has become an important driver of global economic growth and the world's largest job creator. For a long time, a positivist narrative claimed that tourism reduces social inequalities and creates job opportunities for disadvantaged groups. However, critical analyses have questioned the supposed employment benefits of tourism. Despite being labour-intensive, tourism jobs are predominantly in peripheral segments of labour markets, considered low-skilled and low-quality, with low wages and difficult working conditions. Globally, tourism employment is typically low-wage, defined as work where pay is two-thirds or less of the national median gross hourly wage. International comparisons consistently rank tourism as the worst sector in terms of wage levels and job quality. In Italy, a Ministry of Labour report estimated that around 65% of those employed in tourism are at risk of in-work poverty.
Conventional explanations attribute these patterns to the economic and organisational characteristics of the sector. According to this perspective, the redistributive flaw underlying low wages is due to the idea that the tourism industry is 'inherently poor, casual and unorganised'. Factors such as seasonality, low investment per employee, intense competition, and the 'small scale syndrome' (the predominance of small, often family-owned businesses) contribute to poor economic performance and low productivity, leading to low wages.
WHY-SO-POOR challenges the idea that the tourism industry is naturally poor and that low wages, low status, and challenging working conditions are inherent to tourism jobs. It argues that tourism work has been socially constructed as poor due to several interconnected factors: the lack of institutional regulation of tourism work, the historical constitution of tourism jobs (especially their continuity and contiguity with domestic work), labour market inequalities, and the effects of major transformations in the global tourism political economy in recent decades.
Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates the theoretical and methodological frameworks of sociology, geography, history and political economy, WHY-SO-POOR will investigate the interaction between these different factors through multi-site qualitative research on the tourism industry in three Italian regions: Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Calabria. The main objective of WHY-SO-POOR is to develop a holistic and innovative framework that analyses the social, economic, historical, and spatial factors underlying the social construction of low-wage work, thus moving beyond mono-causal explanations that focus solely on economic and organisational factors. Providing a systematic overview of working and wage conditions in the Italian tourism industries, the project will also offer valuable recommendations for improving the quality of work and wages in the tourism sector, benefiting workers, stakeholders, policymakers and society as a whole.

Valentina Mignosa

TES: Tracing Eastern Sicily's networks (XI-V centuries BCE)

The project aims to understand the changing political relations within the network of villages and towns between the 11th and the 5th BCE in Sicily, which was populated by people of different origins, and which was, in turn, immersed in the network of the Mediterranean. For centuries, this period in the island's history has been looked at with the idea that the history of Sicily begins with the arrival of the Greeks. In reality, the centuries before were characterised by intense relations and mobility within and beyond the island.
These networks influenced both the mutual diffusion of material culture and epigraphy. The Greek presence in Sicily provided the indigenous peoples with an instrument of great historical and social importance, the writing system. However, only a little more than a century after its acquisition and use, the indigenous material and literary culture disappeared to make way for what appears to be a completely Greek culture, also moving towards koina. This project builds on the wealth of archaeological work carried out in the last 50 years and on digital data collections to provide new insights into the historical framework of Sicily before, during and after the period when contacts between peoples produced most of the epigraphic evidence, using the south-eastern corner of Sicily as a case study.
The detailed study of the material, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, in an intra-disciplinary way, will make it possible to clarify the phases of this historical moment and thus the processes that led to the end of the indigenous material culture. This research project will have a transformative impact on our understanding of the island’s history and will offer new models for the analysis of socio-political networks.

Researchers Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Michele Mioni

The European Social Model: Theories, Concepts, Ideology and the European Integration Process, 1980s-2010s (EUROSOCIAL)

EUROSOCIAL studies the making and spread of the concept of “European Social Model” (ESM) from the 1980s to our days. The project analyses the intellectual origins of the ESM in academia, and its subsequent use by political and social actors, e.g., the trade unions. In the public mind, the ESM features the rights of citizenship, the welfare state and the social dialogue. This vision has accompanied both academic research and public debate in Europe over the last thirty years, concurrently with the strengthening of the European integration process after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.
EUROSOCIAL aims to historicise this concept through a first critical and well-rounded analysis of the ESM from a conceptual history and a social science viewpoint. By using a multidisciplinary and archive-driven approach, this research studies how the academic concept of ESM related to its historical context, i.e., how the spread of such notion affected the ideas and actions of the political and social actors committed to the European integration. This historical analysis hence emphasises the specific contribution of academia in creating, shaping and influencing the public debate on this topic. It then scrutinises how policy-makers at the European Community level reinterpreted and exploited the concept of ESM to build a “European identity” through social policy. Last, EUROSOCIAL studies how the unionists in three main European countries (Germany, France, Italy, which are as many models of welfare state and labour legislation) received the narrative of the ESM, and to what extent this idea affected the unions’ opinion on the European integration.
The relevance of my project goes beyond the narrow realm of scholarly research in history and social sciences. It concerns questions of public and mediatic concern, such as the tensions between globalisation, European integration and the welfare state. This issue is topical at both national and communitarian levels within the European Union.

Lorenzo Nespoli

A Corpus-based Morphosyntactic Analysis of Early Modern Japanese Translations from Dutch and Portuguese - The role of translation within the process of cultural transfer in Early Modern Japan

The project aims to investigate and analyse the morphosyntactic structures of Early Modern Japanese (1603-1868) used in texts translated from European languages, such as Dutch and Portuguese, using an ad-hoc corpus. It will focus on peculiar structures such as the phenomenon of kakari-musubi, in order to identify the patterns in the distribution of particle-predicate constructs within the translated texts and their original European sources.
The project entails the digitalization of a corpus composed of manuscripts and books that have received little modern scholarly attention, with subsequent statistical analysis of the occurrences of these phenomena. The language featured in the corpus will also be analysed qualitatively, in order to assess the impact that translation of European scientific and literary works has had onto the cultural and scholarly environment of Japan. The quantitative analysis of the phenomena will be carried out by means of modern methodologies of corpus-based translation studies and will be run through a software of statistical analysis. This type of investigation of pre-modern Japanese sources has not been yet carried out in a systematic and thorough manner, let alone in the peculiar case of Dutch and Portuguese studies in Japan. Furthermore, kakari-musubi will be understood as a broader phenomenon used in translation with the purpose of reflecting the conjunction-predicate constructs of the European languages. This is in agreement with the Early Modern Japanese theories of language described by scholars such as Motoori Norinaga and Shizuki Tadao, which predate the importation of Western linguistics in Japan.
The project will shed new light on the actual language used in Early Modern Japanese manuscripts for the translation of European books and will propose new methodologies of corpus-based analyses, according to Early Modern Japanese theories on language, which should find application also in other cultural and linguistic environments.

Ilenia Pittui

knOtt - Digital Iconographic Routes through the Ottoman World

knOtt is intended to create a digital system to provide the first systematic iconological analysis of portraits and images of the Ottomans/Turks and Ottoman culture, society, and ideas. This project will explore the visual and cultural assumptions underlying the construction of these images within the Mediterranean basin from a transcultural perspective. The project is innovative since it will investigate a pan-Mediterranean phenomenon through a non-traditional approach, bringing together European, Ottoman, global, intellectual, emotional, and cultural history, thus providing new elements to the understanding of collective identities. It is timely since it explores crucial issues, such as Muslim Otherness and Western cultural and social stereotypes referring to the Islamic Worlds, aiming to overcome a Eurocentric perspective in the analysis. All these topics are still a central matter to European political, social, and cultural debates, showing the current need for further knowledge on the subject. Focusing on the period 1400-1707, knOtt will propose a new periodisation able to highlight turning points by following the (art-)historical issue of these representations’ truthfulness.
By collecting, labelling, and systematising a representative sample of a larger data set, this action will be able to:
a) lay the foundations for a comprehensive analysis of the subject, defining and visualising all the facets of the Ottoman iconographic paradigm in dialogue with contemporary historical visual and literary narrative representations of the Timurid world, the Safavid Persia, and the Mamluk Egypt, thus correctly re-placing it within the broader Near Eastern scenario;
b) map the metamorphoses of this iconographic phenomenon, outlining and following new interdisciplinary research itineraries with social, cultural, emotional, and political resonances;
c) investigate social, cultural, emotional, political, and artistic (inter)connections between Europe and the Ottoman world, providing further insights for the international academic community.
I will adopt an interdisciplinary methodology combining art historical, historical, philological, and literary approaches with computer-based procedures and methods of Digital Humanities. Furthermore, the action will set the basis for a more ambitious long-term objective to be carried out through a future ERC grant: that is, addressing the 16th-century issue of the truthfulness of Ottomans’ portraits/pictures, raised both by European and Ottoman historians, through the creation of a specialised AI tool – the first in the field – able both to recreate Ottomans’ lost physical features on the basis of surviving textual sources, and to verify the existing ones. This project is set at the intersection of the History of Renaissance and Islamic Art (especially Ottoman Art); Early Modern Studies; Ottoman and Turkish Studies; Persian and Iranian Studies; Digital Humanities; and Computer and Information Sciences.

Viktoryia Vaitovich

Labour market experiences of post-temporary protection Ukrainians in the EU

This research will explore labour market experiences of former temporary protection (TP) holders in the EU, with a focus on Poland and Italy as case studies. It will zoom in on the key policy developments conditioning their lived experiences.
First, it will assess the impact of the activation of the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) in March 2022 in response to the displacement from Ukraine, which granted immediate access to socioeconomic rights, including employment, as well as freedom of movement in the EU. Second, it will evaluate the role of current Ukraine’s accession process to the EU and the potential acquisition of EU citizens’ rights, implying possible direct access to EU Member States’ labour markets.
Finally, it will explore the role of these factors in (non)mitigating the risks and vulnerabilities related to exploitation in low-paid sectors in the EU often experienced by the migrant population, articulating policy recommendations in the area.

Jasmine Pisapia

Ecologies of Performance: A Multimodal Ethnography of Environmental Violence and Embodied Resistance in the Land of Fires, Italy

Ecological crises and the existential threat of climate change have now become undeniable, reaching us from around the world through vivid images: oil spills, waste pits, floods, ravishing forest fires. Yet the effects of environmental violence are often experienced imperceptibly in everyday life, over long periods of time. For this reason, the impact of pollution and toxicity is now commonly referred to as a form of "slow violence". The slow, invisible nature of toxic pollution continues to present a challenge for affected citizens to represent it, or visualize it and thus, ultimately to politically mobilize around solutions. What strategies make visible, represent, and narrate the effects of toxic pollution as a way both to raise awareness and prompt sociopolitical change? In particular, what is the role of performance and theater in mobilizing political action around the environment?
EcoPerForm is a research-creation project that explores these questions through the exemplary case of Terzigno in southern Italy's so-called "Land of Fires," an iconic landscape on the outskirts of Naples where the burning of illegal toxic waste has led to increased rates of disease, and prompted highly performative forms of activism undertaken by the local population. Bringing together ethnographic and theater-based methods, EcoPerForm seeks to develop multimodal research tools in anthropology to document the "ecologies of performance" through which civil society responds to toxic contamination, with the goal of raising environmental awareness, empowering local communities, and promoting sustainable futures in areas affected by the ecological crisis in Europe and beyond.
The project will be supervised by Prof. Valentina Bonifacio and housed between Ca' Foscari's Department of Humanities and The New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) in Venice, with further collaborations with two innovative theater companies: New York City Players and Teatro delle Albe.

Elena Valeri

Wittgenstein in Modern and Contemporary Art

The WITT-ART project focuses on Wittgenstein and the ways in which three modern and contemporary artists – Eduardo Paolozzi, Joseph Kosuth, and Bruce Nauman – have interpreted his thought and make use of it (i.e. converted it into artworks). Compared to the existing critical literature, WITT-ART adopts a different (albeit complementary) perspective. My aim is not only to better understand these three artists’ work by highlighting their Wittgensteinian component, so to speak, but also to assess whether they have contributed to a better and more complete (or simply different) understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
WITT-ART’s approach exemplifies a way of investigating the relationship between philosophy and art which suggests that this relationship is not one-way, from philosopher to artist, but also goes the other way, from artist to philosopher. The idea behind WITT-ART is that, by understanding how a philosopher has “acted” upon (and not merely influenced) an artist’s work, one can also recognise hitherto undetected aspects of that philosopher’s thought.
WITT-ART requires knowledge and skills in both the philosophical and art-historical fields. Given my mostly philosophical background, part of my training will be devoted to broadening my knowledge of contemporary art and the main critical approaches to it. A systematic study of the current philosophy of art is also required, as well as training in visual and media studies (given the three artists’ use of a variety of media). Furthermore, since one objective of WITT-ART is the organising of an exhibition, my training will also include the acquisition of skills related to curatorship.
Through WITT-ART I aim to acquire and consolidate knowledge, skills and research methodologies that might enable me to investigate, understand and make more accessible (including through exhibitions and catalogues) the complex ways in which artistic practices and philosophical thought converge (without merging).

Damiano Acciarino

Encyclopaedia of Renaissance Dreams: Artemidorus Polyglot - ArtPol

The interpretation of dreams has accompanied human culture across history, evolving in response to changing intellectual frameworks. In the Renaissance, theories of dreaming were shaped primarily by Aristotelian natural philosophy, often intersecting with Platonic and Augustinian traditions. At the same time, practical interpretation relied on widely circulating texts such as the Somniale Danielis, which provided a shared oneirocritic symbolic vocabulary across learned and popular contexts. The rediscovery of Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica around 1500 marked a decisive shift. Offering a systematic and detailed account of symbolic dream interpretation, the text rapidly spread across Europe following its first printed Greek edition (1518) and subsequent Latin (1539). Between 1540 and 1606, around forty editions appeared in major European languages, demonstrating its wide cultural impact. Despite this diffusion, the relationships among these editions and their influence on early modern literature and visual culture remain largely unexplored. This project addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of the Oneirocritica’s transmission across linguistic contexts. By producing a polyglot critical edition and an encyclopedia of early modern dream interpretation, the project will illuminate how dreams functioned as a key site of symbolic production, shaping cultural narratives and facilitating the circulation of knowledge across Renaissance Europe.

Monia Chies

Inhabiting the Three-River Sources: An Ethnographic Study

Abstract del progetto non disponibile

Matteo Vagelli

SCIPLU - E pluribus unum? Scientific pluralism and its discontents

SCIPLU is a three-year EU-funded research project that develops a new account of scientific pluralism grounded in the notion of styles of scientific reasoning. Building on recent work in historical epistemology and philosophy of science, the project introduces the concept of stylistic pluralism to analyse how different scientific styles shape methods, evidential standards, and forms of explanation across disciplines. By focusing especially on the human and social sciences, SCIPLU investigates how heterogeneous styles of inquiry contribute to scientific reliability, objectivity, and progress without reducing pluralism to relativism. Combining historical analysis with philosophical investigation, the project aims to clarify the epistemic and societal implications of plural scientific practices and to offer a practice-sensitive framework for understanding the diversity of contemporary science. Based at the Trust in Philosophy and Science (TIPS) Research Centre and led by Dr. Matteo Vagelli, SCIPLU builds on the foundations of his previous MSCA project, Epistyle, which established the groundwork for a style-based understanding of scientific practice.

Researchers "Seal of Excellence"

Linda Zampol D'Ortia

Emotional Practices, Power Relations, and Asymmetrical Dependencies in Catholic missions (1549-1700) – EMOPowers

The project EMOPowers foregrounds emotions as tools of empire.
EMOPowers builds on the research carried out by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action “EMOPractices” to identify how emotional practices produced and justified new power relations and asymmetrical dependencies, in sixteenth-seventeenth-century extra-European Catholic missions.
Recent scholarship has shown that emotions and their embodiments can influence and reshape hierarchies, political discourses, and understandings of the Other. This project therefore investigates early modern missions’ emotional practices to delve deeper into the mechanisms that supported European powers and their (attempted or actualised) processes of colonization at a global level.
EMOPowers is articulated in three Specific Objectives, that will allow it to identify the emotional practices that characterised new Catholic communities created by European missionaries; to understand the processes through which emotional practices supported the creation of new power relations; and to analyse the impact that these latter had on the local political landscape.
The project selects missions located in Asia, Africa, and North America, to offer a wide spectrum of cases geographically, politically, and in relation to gender. The sources considered will be manuscript and printed letters, chronicles, reports, treatises, composed in European and Asian languages, by European and Asian missionaries both.

Within the 2022 call, Ca' Foscari has been selected as Host Institution by 14 researchers from the Seal of Excellence line and by 3 candidates from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action line.

2022 PNRR Young Researchers call - Funded projects

Within the 2022 call, Ca' Foscari has been selected as Host Institution by 14 researchers from the Seal of Excellence line and by 3 candidates from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action line.

Researchers "Seal of Excellence"

Kathrin Bachleitner

SYRIA - The effects of conflict and displacement on national identity. The case of Syria.

The proposed research project theorizes on the effects of conflict and displacement on national identity. It develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework for International Relations (IR) and employs it to explain the case of contemporary Syria. It explores the new meanings that the Syrian identity takes on as a result of the ongoing civil war and its accompanying waves of refugees. It collects Syrian 'narratives of conflict' to understand how ordinary Syrians draw the boundaries around their national in-group. This information will be crucial for any sustainable peace settlement as well as for the legitimacy of a future Syrian state. The findings obtained from this research thus could be useful for the EU’s ongoing mediation efforts and its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), in addition to having broader implications for the academic understanding of national identity change amid conflict in IR theory.

Martina Ceolin

ConTexts - Texts in Contexts. Manuscript Transmission and Generic Hybridity in the 'Late' Íslendingasögur

Within the rich and diverse literary heritage that medieval Icelandic sagas constitute are the so-called 'post-classical' or 'late' Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders), a group of texts from the fourteenth century that are attested primarily in manuscripts from the fifteenth. They are remarkable in many ways, including that they play upon literary conventions and they defy strict categorisations of genre. However, scholars have so far largely neglected them for the same reasons, disregarding them as extravagant or because they are challenging to consider from the genre perspective.
The main objective of this project proposal is to offer a better comprehension and thus also a re-evaluation of these largely neglected texts, by studying them at once individually and from within their manuscript contexts. The focus will be on the characteristics they display, notably in terms of genre, and on the intertextual connections that can be established between them and the often diverse material they are copied alongside. The socio-cultural contexts of production and use of the texts and their manuscripts will also be investigated. The objectives will be achieved by adopting a multifaceted perspective, involving genre theory, material philology, and history of mentalities. Reading these sagas within their material contexts (within manuscripts) will shed light on both their individual nature and on the dynamics characterising the codexes in which they appear. In turn, this will provide us with clues that can be used to figure out the hidden logic embedded in each specific collection of texts, while possibly also disclosing information about the respective contexts of production and use. The new knowledge the project will yield is a novel and thorough study of previously neglected texts, which will promote their investigation as legitimate and interesting products of their own time, as well as crucially contribute to the critical debate and to future studies in the field.

Harald Edinger

RUSS STRAT AMBIGUITY - Strategic Ambiguity in Russian Nuclear Posture

This research examines the evolution of Russia's nuclear posture by focusing on 'strategic ambiguity'. Although first described by American strategists, it is contemporary Russian nuclear signalling that is most representative of the concept. Edinger argues that its leadership has leveraged strategic ambiguity to exploit adversaries’ risk aversion and fear of escalation, while preserving its credibility by avoiding more concrete threats in line with the country’s declaratory policies. Most assessments of Russian nuclear strategy are based on interpretations of its doctrine and associated military debates. In this project, however, the focus is on political statements by the president, prime minister, foreign minister, minister of defence, or the Security Council. Using a combination of discourse analysis and causal-process tracing methods, Edinger studies the evolution of officials’ statements involving nuclear signalling, particularly during periods of heightened tensions between Russia and the West. Ambiguity forms the basis of deterrence theory. Yet, no systematic, book-length account of it exists – neither as an empirical guide, nor a theoretical exploration. Russian strategic culture serves as a basis for building a theory of strategic ambiguity – taking into account the risk tolerance of the Russian leadership, corresponding risk aversion of Western target audiences, as well as the costs of ambiguous signalling. The theory proposes sources and purposes of ambiguity (e.g., inconsistencies between doctrine and public statements, religious rhetoric, nuclear-conventional entanglement) and probes their plausibility by analysing episodes of nuclear signalling. Theoretical propositions are deconstructed and substantiated by reference to the pertinent literature in strategic studies, political psychology, and interdisciplinary scholarship on emotion and risk assessment – with the intention of generating more general hypotheses on the use of strategic ambiguity.

Facundo Norberto Bey

HUMANS - Humanisms within and beyond the Nation-State. An Interdisciplinary Inquiry on The Philosophical and Ideological Interpretations of humanitas in German Rediscovery of Plato's Educational Thought

What conceptions of the human being can we identify in the politico-philosophical exercises that ‘translated’ Platonic paideía into German Bildung between 1919 and 1945 without neglecting neither their historico-political connotations and possible repercussions, nor falling back into archaic (worryingly although present) figures like race, body, people, or nationality? What kind of utopian humanisms and what philosophical conceptions of political education can we conceive today beyond the Nation-State framework? This research focuses on how Plato’s political thought had been consolidated as the ground for three major theoretical ruptures within, beyond, and against the different German 'humanist' and philhellenist currents that developed between 1919 and 1945. HUMANS builds on Bey's research and expertise on Plato’s political thought reception in Germany to address the theoretical lacunae consequence of methodological one-sidedness. Thus, Bey considers it central to this research to adopt an interdisciplinary reception theory approach in order to address historically and philosophically the complexity of the conditions for which Plato’s work became meaningful during the Weimar and Third Reich times. Bey will address specifically the existing theoretical "gaps" from an interdisciplinary framework able to work on 3 levels: the philosophical, the philological, and the historical. HUMANS also contributes to advancing research by broadening our contemporary understanding of Plato’s political thought in the light of the pressing current migrant/ethnic discrimination phenomena in Europe, aiming to empower non-scholar audiences (especially victims of discrimination).

Daniele Ferraiuolo

InSignO - Inscriptions and Signs as devotional markers along the routes Of faith (7th-11th centuries)

As the cult of relics spread, between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, all devotional centers of Western Europe – on the example of some important royal sites (Saint Médard of Soissons, Saint-Denis of Paris, Saint Ambrose of Milan) – prepared to receive many pilgrims. The space undergoes radical transformations to enable visitors to access the main sacred foci whose visibility was made possible by "markers" represented by inscriptions and signs. This proposal seeks to analyze the main types of devotional markers located at shrines along the pilgrimage routes of Italy and France between the 7th and 11th centuries. The goal is to develop the first survey of this type of testimonies and to begin the construction of a long-term Digital Archive. InSignO will focus on the following general objectives: 1) Identifying the main types of markers by defining their functions (inscriptions indicating relics, funerary signacula, liturgical markers etc.); 2) Analyzing the markers’ formal, textual and graphic characteristics, in order to recover information on their original spatial perception; 3) Overcoming the classic approach to devotional practices, giving the markers the role of important sources, worthy of being considered alongside the conventional sources; 4) Creating a Digital Archive to have a solid basis for future research developments. With a multidisciplinary interpretation, this project aims to examine several types of sources to reconstruct the markers' visual perception bearing in mind the conditions of the environment and the context of reference. InSignO envisages the intersection of data from analyzing markers (typology, writings etc.) with the material (architecture and archaeological) and textual ones (medieval pilgrims' travel diaries). The Digital Archive, linked to a GIS, ensures the management of a wide variety of data (photos, drawings, descriptions, videos), research interoperability and long-term preservation.

Inga Jonaityte

I.COPE.BEST - Financial Technology Inclusion in the COVID-19 Pandemic Era: a Behavioral Economics Perspective

Financial Technologies (FinTech) provide new ways to convey financial services, are transforming financial industry, and make consumers face increasing responsibility in managing personal finances and making optimal economic decisions. FinTech solutions are introduced at an unprecedented rate and understanding how consumers perceive, comprehend, and adopt them is a complex topic of growing importance. This landscape is further complicated by the massive influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer financial behavior. I.COPE.BEST aims to: Assess FinTech risks and challenges consumers face in financial decision-making; Expand the understanding of how FinTech interacts with the processes underlying consumer financial behavior; Explore the potential of FinTech in facilitating financial inclusion and improving economic decisions; Identify useful descriptors and provide possible solutions that could help everyone take full advantage of these technologies. Special attention is on analyzing the behavior of less-tech-savvy and age- or gender-gap-affected consumers, such as women whose financial decisions in the COVID-19 era are affected further by the concern of career disruptions. These objectives are addressed using an experimental approach focusing on behavioral economics and consumer psychology, and including open-science and citizen-science practices. Experiments are based on online survey questionnaires and crowdsourcing, and rely on the development of a flexible game-type platform crafted to (i) distil the main challenges that consumers face when making decisions and (ii) estimate the causal relationships. Although this platform specifically mimics robo-advisors and personal banking environments, it is flexible and could be used for other online and in-the-lab behavioral studies. Ultimately, it is designed to provide the citizens open-access evidence/tools to understand, appreciate, tackle, but also "control" the opportunities offered by fair and inclusive FinTech.

Morris Karp

MOST - Money and Sovereignty Today

MOST investigates from a philosophical perspective the transforming relationship between money and sovereignty due to the emergent circulation of digital currencies, both private and national. The relationship between money and sovereignty appears today on the verge of an unprecedented transformation: on the one hand, the diffusion of crypto- currencies opens the possibility of a progressive denationalization of money; on the other, the race towards central bank digital currencies - recently accelerated by the geopolitical tensions due to the war in Ukraine - creates the conditions for the end of the current monetary order, based on dollar supremacy. The omen of monetary fragmentation threatens the current monetary order, both in the sense of monetary anarchy within or monetary war among the states. By offering a timely analysis of this ongoing process, MOST supports the endeavors to regulate the monetary order transformation to achieve more inclusive and equal economic practices. On the assumption of a circular dynamic of interdependence between ideas and technologies, MOST is a solid interdisciplinary project that combines from a philosophical perspective aspects of Monetary History, History of Economic Thought, Political Theory and International Relations in order to study the evolving relationship between money and sovereignty. By offering a timely analysis of this ongoing process, MOST supports the endeavors to regulate the monetary order transformation to achieve more inclusive and equal economic practices. At the time when the European Central Bank is studying the possibility of issuing its own digital currency, MOST takes part in the development of the intellectual tools for the European Union’s strategic autonomy.

Marco Marsili

LEDI - Lawful Emerging and Disruptive Technologies and Warfare. Consistency with International Law and further Considerations and Implications

Science fiction pictured conflicts fought in outer space and conceived scenarios with artificial intelligence and self-learning machines that mimic humans. Sometimes science fiction offers imaginative solutions for the future. Technology is the key driver of warfare and blurs the traditional boundaries. Technological innovations have legal, ethical and moral implications. This project aims to check the compliance of (military) emerging & disruptive technologies (EDTs) with international law (IL), international humanitarian law (IHL), international human rights law (IHRL) and ethical standards in an altered geopolitical environment. The project comprises technologies that are distinctly military in nature and not civilian in application, usually because they lack useful or legal civilian applications, and civilian innovations that have been put to military use. EDTs are increasingly touching all aspects of life and have a profound impact on defence, security and civilian society. EDTs have a rapid and major effect on technologies that already exist and disrupt or overturn traditional business methods and practices and may revolutionise governmental structures, economies and international security. The research will scrutinise whether new rules are required, or if current rules are valid and can be used/adapted, and will formulate recommendations for policymakers, lawmakers and military leaders. The research topic involves main cross-cutting issues (the rule of law, fundamental human rights and ethical principles) and therefore requires an interdisciplinary approach: history, political science, political philosophy, sociology, law, ethics, neuroscience, robotics and computer science. The research aims to create new knowledge and to contribute to develop solutions for the global challenges of today and tomorrow. Because the future is now, this timely research aims to understand the present and to imagine future scenarios – that’s why it’s important.

Ivan Matijašić

MoCHA - Memories of Classical and Hellenistic Athens

The project considers the reception, changes and rearrangement of Classical & Hellenistic historiography on Athens in lexica, etymologica and scholarly works of the Roman imperial and Byzantine ages (2nd-10th c. CE). The purpose is to broaden our knowledge of the historiography on Athens reassessing the significance of fragmentary texts for the history of Athens (complementary with the preserved works of Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon) and the role of Greek lexicography and other scholarly works in transmitting these fragments. There are three main objectives: 1) set up an electronic archive for the storage of historical information on Classical & Hellenistic Athens preserved in Greek lexica, etymologica and other scholarly works; 2) focus on case-studies related to Athenian historiography through later sources; 3) consider the later reception of Athenian history and historiography. While both fragmentary Greek historiography and Greek lexicography are well-studied fields, their interactions remain largely unexplored. MoCHA aims at filling this gap focusing on the historiography on Athens through the lens of oft-neglected sources. This topic has never been considered because it involves competences in fields that are all too often separated: Ancient History & Classical Philology. My professional experience and publication record show that I am fully entitled to complete this research. The DUS at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with its Centre for Digital & Public Humanities and the internationally recognised strength in Greek history, literature and language, represents the ideal environment to carry out the research.

Federico Mazzola

CIAO - Creation and Investigation of Alternative Oxides

The project addresses the study of an oxide-based quantum material family that might generate unexplored physical phenomena, with relevance for electronics and spintronics. This study aims at engineering quantum phenomena driven by the action of the spin-orbit coupling in d-electrons oxides. Spin-orbit coupling can be thought as a coupling between the orbital motion and the electron spins and could be used to produce currents, i.e. spin-currents, without dissipation and with extremely low switching energies, realizing fertile ground for a vast range of applications. CIAO will adopt a bottom-up approach for the synthesis, nanofabrication and control of the material systems. It will first and foremost investigate the AO3 5d transition metal oxides. Despite their structural simplicity, these materials have been very little studied and could host remarkable electronic properties and collective states, arising from the large physical extension of the 5d electronic wave functions, orbital mixing, and spin-orbit coupling, expected to be much larger than the sister 3d and 4d compounds. Starting from preliminary proof-of-principle data on WO3, which demonstrate the feasibility of the synthesis in this family of materials, we aim to adopt a bottom-up approach to study how the electronic properties of these compounds are modified by the action of reduced dimensionality, strain, and quantum confinement. Mazzola will do this by exploiting the infrastructure at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice for materials’ synthesis and characterization as well as the ongoing collaboration that the PI has established with the APE-LE group in Trieste (iom-CNR). With CIAO Mazzola will be able to reach unprecedented control on the electronic properties of this strongly spin-orbit coupled oxides family and advance the field towards precise and digital control of both structural and electronic degrees of freedom.

Samuele Mazzolini

POPINLAT - Populism and institutions in Latin America. A comparative assessment between Ecuador and Argentina

POPINLAT scrutinises the oft-contested and under-theorised relationship between populism and institutions through a comparative analysis of the recent left-of-centre processes in Ecuador (2007-2017) and Argentina (2003-2015). This research innovatively brings into the analysis also the post-populist phase in order to assess the resilience and embeddedness of the institutionality left behind by the populist rule (2017-2020 and 2015-2019, respectively) and, as a result, allows to theorise on the possibility and conditions of emergence of a "republican populism". In this sense, the current moment is particularly well-suited to carry out the proposed research. POPINLAT is situated at the crossroads of different disciplines, namely political theory, comparative politics and institutional analysis, thus using and integrating diverse methodologies. By looking at the institutional merits and shortcomings of the two cases, the project will cast light on the Latin American pink tide as a whole, and more importantly, provide a novel approach in populism studies, which can be applied to the European case as well. Having an excellent competence in populism and discourse analysis, and having worked in the Ecuadorian institutions during the period under scrutiny, I think of being in a favourable position to successfully complete this research and obtain professional maturity so as to become a leading academic in the field of populism studies.

Francesco Trevisan

INMOBILIS - Inequality and Mobility under Social Competition

Income inequality in OECD countries is at its highest level. In addition, the recent pandemic has not helped to close the income gap. This widening gap has spurred economists to investigate the subject more deeply. To their results, it is now widely believed that greater levels of income inequality in a country are associated with lower levels of social mobility. In a competitive society like ours, where jobs, promotions, and places at university are assigned through contest-like mechanisms, the rising inequality can have critical effects. For example, it is often mentioned that low-income individuals lack the resources to compete for high-income jobs, an issue also raised by David Sassoli (2020): "[...] for too many decades, those who are born poor remain poor. Social mobility, so important for my generation, has stalled for too long. That is why Parliament is calling for greater ambition." This project contributes to the debate by building an innovative dynamic model of contests that relates inequality to social mobility and growth. It relates inequality to social mobility by employing a model of noisy contests (Tullock, 1980; Clark and Riis, 1996) rather than a deterministic one (auctions). Further, it includes growth by assuming that the contest repeats over time and rewards are performance-dependent. The higher the players’ performances, the greater the sum of the prizes available. I expect to provide not only policy recommendations on how the appropriate use of redistributive policies and investments in education can sustain social mobility, well-being, and growth in the long run but also novel theoretical findings that can serve as a benchmark for policy suggestions and future empirical research on the topic.

Giulia Zanon

Minims - Devotions on the Move: The Circulation of the Cult of San Francesco di Paola in Early Modern Mediterranean

This interdisciplinary project investigates how mobility shaped the devotion of new saints around the Mediterranean Sea (1545-1800c.). Studying the geographical and chronological diffusion of the cult of San Francesco di Paola (1416-1507, canonised 1519), this project will break new ground by evaluating the contribution of mobility and environment to the emergence of new cults and the ways in which lay piety, visual arts and patronage shaped devotions. Devotion to San Francesco di Paola was soon prevalent around the Adriatic coasts and the Mediterranean Sea, attracting a noteworthy diversity of devotees. MINIMS draws attention to the importance of mobility and environment in Catholic devotion and religious culture and how it ran in parallel with the broader importance of mobility in the early modern period, bringing a fresh perspective on historiographical debates. The interdisciplinary approach is an original methodological contribution, and it will open space for discussion on how we carry out historical enquiries across disciplines, taking inspiration from social sciences and the mobility turn. Combining methodological approaches from history and history of art, the project will place different genres of sources in conversation with one another. MINIMS will contribute to scientific advancement in religious, political, social and cultural European early modern history and art history. MINIMS will create new knowledge on the mobility of new devotions in Catholic Europe and the Mediterranean, and its interdisciplinarity and innovative methodology will be of reference for future projects in the field more broadly, thanks to diverse dissemination and communication activities, including the use of a GIS map to geo- visualise religious mobility across the Mediterranean in the early modern period. The research contribution will create international collaborations and networks which will overall benefit the diverse research topics.

Researchers Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

David Malcolm McOmish

CAPIENS - Cosmopolitan Academics, Pluralist Institutions, and the emergence of the New Sciences

Employing a blend of textual, philosophical and biographical approaches, this project will offer a robust account of the significant role played by 'cosmopolitan' academics in institutional settings from 1560-1630 - a crucial period for the development of the new sciences. The project will examine university theses, manuscripts lecture notes, and published material produced by a close network of academics who operated at institutions that possessed relative degrees of political and religious autonomy from the respective prevalent orthodoxies within their territories. The project will focus upon the impact of cosmopolitan scholarly culture in universities spread geographically across Europe, from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Britain, the Kingdom of France to the Venetian Republic, and the German Princely states to Provence; all of which were situated across Europe's varied national and confessional divides. The ambivalent relationships the institutions had with the immediate political environment in which they operated fostered confessionally-alienated academic cultures that increasingly eschewed the contentiously philosophical for more neutral approaches. Edinburgh, Helmstedt, Montpellier, Paris, Padua/Venice, and Zamosc were centres at which the academics from differing national and confessional backgrounds were able to congregate and work. Close reading and cross-referencing between centres will offer insight into the impact these scholars made. A recent MSCA project (ENNSE) at Venice has shown that a distinctly cosmopolitan culture imported to Edinburgh through this network infiltrated the traditional Aristotelian framework for teaching in Natural Philosophy and began the process of replacing it with emergent scientific disciplines. This group of closely-connected scholars worked and were educated across all of these centres during this period. This project will show that the firm hold that the new knowledge took in Edinburgh, and the definitively 'modern' shape it took, must be understood in the politically-determined cosmopolitan cultures of the centres across Europe at which the network studied and worked.

Deborah Nadal

MULTIBODI - A Multispecies Ethnography of Human-Animal-Environment Assemblages for Tick-Borne Disease Prevention in Italy and Slovenia

Lyme disease (LD) and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) are the two fastest-growing tick-borne diseases, a group of infections that represent a major problem in the Northern Hemisphere and an emergent issue in the Global South. So far, LD and TBE prevention have mainly focused on individual protective measures, with limited effect. The design of strategies that involve the entire human-animal-environment community, through an integrated One Health approach, has received limited attention with regard to these two diseases, while it has already proven effective for many others. MULTIBODI aims at building a participatory, One Health-centred, interdisciplinary, intersectoral conversation, informed by ethnography, on multispecies community-based strategies for LD and TBE prevention in two highly endemic areas, i.e. the Belluno province in Northeast Italy and the Gorenjska region in Northern Slovenia. The specific objectives are: 1) To map and extend – while doing fieldwork – the diverse network of stakeholders, across different institutions, disciplines, sections of society, and geographical scales (local, national and European), interested in joining this paradigm shift; 2) To untangle the local, context-specific socio-economic-ecological complexities of disease transmission through the collection of qualitative data on the experience, knowledge, and perspectives of local people on how to cope with, and reduce, the risk of tick-borne diseases in humans and animals; 3) To share and discuss the knowledge co-produced in the first two phases through four community juries aimed at developing a One Health community-based strategy for LD and TBE prevention. MULTIBODI merges theories and practices from applied anthropology, medical anthropology and multispecies ethnography, and is inspired by posthuman studies on human-animal-environmental assemblages and the principles of active citizenship and community-based participatory research.

Nicole Tabasso

RON - Rumours on Networks

The proposed project aims to increase our understanding of the factors that allow rumours and misinformation to spread on (online) social networks. Given the global corona pandemic and the rise of the so-called "post-truth" society, the harm that misinformation may cause has been recognized, and it can hardly be overstated. Political examples of this harm abound. While the literature has come a long way in uncovering various factors that influence the diffusion of misinformation, it is still not perfectly understood. However, only increased understanding will allow us to fight the persistence of misinformation and rumours. In this project, Tabasso aims to employ theoretical, empirical, and simulation tools to (i) uncover motivations to share unverified information; (ii) model how ideological identity groups may form on a network, and (iii) analyse how specific network characteristics interact with information characteristics to either hinder or help the diffusion of information. This work is built on earlier work of Tabasso, funded through an MSCA fellowship, and is part of a long-term research subject, whose aim it is to find efficient ways to deal with the spread of misinformation without impacting freedom of expression.

Alberto Fabris

GlobalIngoli - Francesco Ingoli (1578-1649) as Political Thinker and Global Theorist

The GlobalIngoli project aims to reassess Francesco Ingoli’s significance as a political thinker through the first philosophical and conceptual analysis of his intellectual production as General Secretary of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, and particularly of his Relazione delle Quattro Parti del Mondo (~1633). In this text, Ingoli combined data and information from missionary sources and erudite treatises with his reflections about worldwide geography, politics and anthropology, proposing a new perspective on newly discovered regions. Despite the importance of Ingoli’s work, attesting to the deep resemantisation of political space that resulted from 16th and 17th-century geographical discoveries, an in-depth assessment of his political thought from the perspective of political philosophy is still largely missing. Combining a historical-philosophical approach with cultural history, international early-modern studies and global history, this project aims at 1) situating Ingoli’s Relazione in the context of 17th -century political debate; 2) investigating Ingoli’s approach towards the new political space resulting from geographical discoveries; 3) retracing the explicit and implicit sources of the Relazione to shed new light on the impact exercised by extra-European contributions on Western culture and contribute understanding the early modernity as a global phenomenon.