Marie Curie Fellows - 2020 Call

Walaa Alqaisiya

DEJMENA - Decolonial Environmental Justice: from Middle East and North Africa to North America

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has proved the urgent need for more expansive theorising, research and action on Environmental Justice with indigenous communities by showing their huge vulnerability, yet revealing the value of their ecologies. This project provides a reading of environmental justice at the crosscut of indigeneity and feminist decoloniality. It draws on local activists’ and indigenous communities’ struggles with environmental (in)justice, particularly land and water protection, across the Levant, North Africa, and North America.
To accomplish this goal, Walaa Alqaisiya will work in collaboration with profs. Matteo Legrenzi (Ca’ Foscari, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage), Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University, NY) and Michael Mason (London School of Economics and Political Science). 

Walaa Alqaisiya

RIGHT - The ‘right’ in human rights: Aristotelianism and Neo-Confucianism at the basis of the EU-China Dialogue

RIGHT is an interdisciplinary research project bringing together philosophy with human rights policy-making, with the former providing a very rigid framework for the advancement of the latter. In particular, the project aspires to develop a cutting-edge definitional human rights framework on the basis of Aristotelianism and Neo-Confucianism (Daoxue 道学), thus filling a major gap in human rights theory and practice and offering a basis for the sustainable continuation of the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue.
Anna Baka will spend the first two years of the project at the East Asian Languages and Civilisations Department of Harvard University. The third year she will be hosted by the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari under the supervision of prof. Marco Sgarbi.

Jessie Barton Hronešová

VICTIMEUR - The New Politics of Victimhood in Post-socialist Europe

VICTIMEUR will investigate how frames of victimhood have featured in the politics of post-socialist Europe in the past two decades, and whether and how such frames have influenced the current illiberal trends across the region. The project will specifically study different meanings, notions and constructions of victimhood and how they have featured in key moments of political contestation such as power transitions and crises. It will introduce a new understanding of social and political victimhood that clearly manifests itself in contemporary post-socialist Europe, linked to collective and individual grievances that vary from memories of historical injustice, East-West divisions, socialist political persecution, war suffering, and a recent sense of marginalization by capitalism.
Jessie Barton Hronešová will develop this project at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of Matteo Legrenzi and at the Department of Political Science at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill under the supervision of Milada Anna Vachudova.

Nicola Bassoni

YTOPIA – Yamatology of the Axis. Japan as a Nazi-Fascist Utopia of Political Renewal

YTOPIA aims to re-semanticise the term of yamatology to indicate the political discourses on Japan which emerged in the late 19th century and became mainstream until 1945, lasting until today in far-right milieus. YTOPIA tackles the history of yamatology by focusing on the discursive construction of the image of Japan in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, the interaction between European and Japanese actors, and the development of Axis' cultural politics. The leading hypothesis of YTOPIA is that yamatology can be interpreted as a utopian discourse that conveys values and aspirations of the ideological framework in which it is produced, as well as an intellectual mean to criticize the gap between the idea of a new kind of society and the socio-political reality of the time.
Nicola Bassoni will carry out his research project at the Faculty of Sociology of Kyoto Sangyo University and at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari (under the supervision of prof. Toshio Miyake), with a three-month period at the University of Konstanz.

Giuseppe Bianco

INTERPHIL - The international congresses and the transnational shaping of philosophy (1900-1948): Spaces – Struggles – Identity – Knowledge

The project analyses the construction of philosophy’s disciplinary identity by studying the first ten International Congresses in Philosophy (1900-1948), relating them to the emergence in Europe of a new academic space that aimed at unity across different schools of thought. The inquiry adopts an inter-disciplinary and multi-scalar approach in order to explain the constitution of a transnational philosophical space, the formation of philosophical ideas of Europe and the participation of philosophers in international institutions such as the League of Nations.
The project is based at Ca' Foscari's Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, under the supervision of Pietro Daniel Omodeo, and at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), under the supervision of Yves Gingras. 

Pascal Bohleber

MICRO-CLIMATE - Micron-scale Ice Core Reconstruction of Abrupt Climate Changes

Understanding natural climate dynamics is fundamental to manage abrupt climate change, one of the grand challenges to global sustainability. One of the most important natural archives, polar ice cores offer the detailed study of past abrupt climate transitions. To decipher the sequence of events requires fine temporal detail, which can be delivered by Laser-Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). At micron-scale resolution, however, it is pivotal to take into account interaction of impurities with the ice crystal matrix. MICRO-CLIMATE brings together, for the first time, two LA-ICP-MS setups to realize high-throughput and high detail analysis for the analysis of past abrupt climate changes in ice cores.
In his second Marie Curie fellowship, Pascal Bohleber will visit the University of Maine, USA, to collaborate with prof. Paul Mayewksi, before returning to the Department of Environmental Science, Informatics and Statistics at Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Carlo Barbante.

Alessandro Cabiati

MadLand - Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900

This interdisciplinary project investigates how in 19th-century Britain, France, and the United States literary fairy tales contributed to the cultural discourse on psychological deviance and abnormality, while also influencing medical debate. MadLand provides the first transnational and translinguistic investigation of the ways in which 19th-century fairy tales reflected, incorporated, and even questioned medical interpretations of deviance and abnormal behaviour. The project also explores the fairy-tale imagery of monstrosity, analysing how fairy-tale monstrosity in turn served as a point of reference for the codification of insanity by psychiatry in its formative period, 1820-1900.
Alessandro Cabiati will undertake his research at Brown University with prof. Lewis Seifert and at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies of Ca’ Foscari, under the supervision of prof. Laura Tosi.

Matteo Capasso

GLIBAL – La Dimensione Globale della Crisi Libica

Breaking with current interpretations that present the Libyan war as a result of historically self-inflicted and local problems, the project examines the war from a global perspective. It investigates how those processes that were central to the development of the US-led global capitalist order unfolded, shaped and were contested in the Libyan microcosm from 1969 to the present. The project will contribute to clarify the ways in which evolving global governance schemes are connected to the outbreak of conflicts in the Global South.
Matteo Capasso will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari with prof. Matteo Legrenzi and at the MESAAS Department of Columbia University NY with prof. Timothy Mitchell.

Andrea Chiampan

Inventing GPS - Technology and International Security in the Cold War and Beyond

This project provides the first in-depth historiographical study of the Global Positioning System (GPS) development, highlighting the interplay of technological innovation with Cold War politics and prevailing military-strategic culture. Through the ‘applied history’ methodology, the project will also analyze the implications of satellite-navigation technology for the future of European security.
Andrea Chiampan will develop his project at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Matteo Legrenzi and at the Department of History of the University of Toronto under the supervision of prof. Timothy Sayle. 

Maria Vittoria Comacchi

PostelEast – Guillaume Postel and the East: Universalism in the Global Renaissance

The project investigates the religious and political universalism of the French polymath and traveler Guillaume Postel (1510-1581). The aim is to bring out the crucial role that his encounter with the Ottoman Empire and the European intellectuals who showed a renewed interest in Islam played in his universalism. The project focuses on the historical-intellectual genesis of a key text, his “De orbis terrae concordia” (1544), its limits, polemics, and originality, the ideas Postel held about the Ottoman Empire and Islam after 1544, and his significant contribution to the dissemination of ‘oriental’ books across the Mediterranean. It thus explores Postel’s influence in the apparently contradictory development of European orientalism on the one hand and cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance on the other.
Maria Vittoria Comacchi will work with Kaya Sahin at the Department of History of the Indiana University Bloomington for the first two years and with Marco Sgarbi at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice during the third year, besides a research period at the Department of Antiquity and Middle Ages Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Lorena Córdoba

NAMELESS-STORIES - The Invisible Women: Nameless and Forgotten Stories of the Rubber Boom (Bolivian Amazonia, 19-20th centuries)

The project aims to reconstruct and revalue female agency during the ‘Rubber Boom’ in Bolivian Amazonia. The goal is to rescue the testimony of indigenous women neglected by the historical sources on the account of their ethnic condition, as well as the social agency of the Creole or European female laborers who were ‘silenced’ by the sexist bias of regional historiography or rendered invisible as immigrant settlers.
Lorena Córdoba will work at the Department of Humanities of Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Valentina Bonifacio.

Davide Crippa

LEGITIMATH - Teaching and learning practices of calculus in the 18th century: the case of Italian mathematics and its European dimension

This project aims to explore the history of differential and integral calculus focusing on acquisition and circulation of its teaching and learning practices in 18th century Europe. Integrating history of mathematics and mathematical education, oral and cultural histories, this research project will reconstruct, on the basis of a number of manuscript sources, the function of oral knowledge in the processes of acquiring mathematical knowledge in the context of several learned communities in the Italian peninsula and through the transnational circulation of Maria Gaetana Agnesi’s textbook of analysis “Istituzioni Analitiche ad uso della gioventú italiana” (1748), its reception outside Italy and its first French and English translations. Davide Crippa will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, under the supervision of prof. Marco Sgarbi, and will spend a research period at the Sarton Centre for history of Science of Ghent University, working with prof. Maarten van Dyck.

Valentina Dal Cin

NapApps - Napoleonic Job Applications: from Personal Pleas to Modern Curriculum Vitae in Early 19th-Century Europe

NapApps project studies the emergence of job applications in Napoleonic bureaucracy at the beginning of the XIX century. Its goal is to analyse the transition from the pleas characteristic of the ancient regime to the modern curriculum vitae, by using statistical text analysis on a massive corpus of archival sources. Napoleonic France spread across Europe the revolutionary model according to which public employments would be open to all citizens, based on "their virtues and talents". Consequently, through these 'writing to power' sources, the project will study the emergence of a rhetoric of knowledge and skills, based on the understanding of new values, thus assessing the socio-cultural impact of political changes.
Valentina Dal Cin will develop her project at the Department of Humanities at Ca' Foscari (supervisor: prof. Dorit Raines), and at CESTA (Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis) at Stanford University (supervisor: prof. Giovanna Ceserani).

Giulia Dal Maso

CHINGREEN - On the financialization of green: Chinese operations along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

The project CHINGREEN is an in-depth qualitative study of Chinese "green-finance" operations along the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). It explores the increasing expansion of the complex Chinese green finance nexus by asking to what extent this is (re)shaping the ongoing process of financialization of nature.  Through in-depth qualitative studies of Chinese banks green landing practices in the two-biodiversity hotspots of the BRI (South East Asia and Central Asia), the study will investigate how financial products and infrastructures are defined and capitalised as “green” and what is their impact on the ground.
Giulia Dal Maso will develop the first two years of the project at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the third year at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Daniele Brombal.

Grazia Deng

HEIEL - Healthcare Encounters in Immigrants’ Everyday Lives

HEIEL aims to investigate how Chinese immigrants in Italy perceive their bodies, manage their health, and experience the local healthcare system and how these perceptions and experiences affect their identity formation. This ethnographic study will locate immigrant subjects’ everyday healthcare practices at the intersection of their transnational migration process, dynamic political and social realities, and geopolitics. It will examine Chinese immigrants’ interactions with various types of healthcare providers and institutions, both formal and informal, which would affect their healthcare choices and practices. The project will provide a new bottom-up narrative of immigrant health amid ambiguous power dynamics that immigrant subjects’ encounter in an increasingly pluralistic EU welfare state.
Grazia Deng will be based at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Matteo Legrenzi. 

Marisa Di Martino

REWRITE - Rewriting Migrant Identities across Women’s Literature

REWRITE explores the transformation process in migrant women’s identities, by studying the self-reflexivity in migrant women writers from a critical discourse analysis, advocating for social change. By discussing with the EU’s Pillar of Social Rights, REWRITE aims to bridge the gap between gender-based human mobility and social change via the comparative analysis between the European integration policies and their impact of migrant women’s identity reconstruction processes from an intersectional perspective.
This project is developed at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies of Ca' Foscari under the supervision of prof. Luis Beneduzi and at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing – Wolfson College of the University of Oxford.

Jacob Andrew Garrett

PARENT CITIZENS - Schools of Citizenship: Parent Councils at Public Schools in Italy, Spain, and France

In the wake of economic, climate, and violent crises throughout the Mediterranean region, Europe is in the midst of one of the largest historical waves of asylum seekers and immigrants. While most European wide civic education initiatives focus on school children, the focus of this study is participation of immigrant parents at schools. Parent councils at public schools are uniquely situated as civic educational institutions and remain nearly absent from citizenship education initiatives in Europe. This absence in the scholarly literature and European institutional initiatives is surprising given the established finding that schools are the primary public institution where immigrants interface with others and participate civically. To advance knowledge on immigrant integration, PARENT CITIZENS investigates the institutional development of parent councils and the participatory interactions of immigrant parents in three of the highest immigrant recipient countries in Europe: Italy, Spain, and France.
Jacob Garrett will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Matteo Legrenzi.

Dunja Jelenkovic

CBA TRIESTE – The Cinematic Battle for the Adriatic: Films, Frontiers, and the Trieste Crisis

Dunja Jelenkovic is a cultural historian, specialized in film festivals and (post-)Yugoslav documentary cinema. In CBA TRIESTE, she will analyse cinematic practices related to the Trieste Crisis (1945-1954), a diplomatic struggle over the Italian-Yugoslav borderlands at the outset of the Cold War. She will compare Italian and Yugoslav (Slovenian, Croatian) and historical and contemporary perspectives on the struggle for this territory, by investigating three levels of cinematic action: film production, film festival circulation, and film reception through awards and press reviews. The project will make widely accessible a collection of related cinematic cultural heritage through a digital archive. In doing so, it will provide a contribution to the study of cinema, film festivals and cultural memory, and a practical toolkit for researchers and cultural programmers.
Dunja Jelenkovic will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage under the supervision of prof. Marco Dalla Gassa, with a secondment at the University of Ljubljana (prof. Marta Verginella).

Francesco Luzzini

SOUNDEPTH – Sounding the Depths of Providence: Mineral (Re)generation, Natural Resources, and Human-Environment Interaction in the Early Modern Period

This interdisciplinary project aims to understand how the debate on mineral generation in early modern Europe influenced the development of natural philosophy, the Earth sciences, and the role of humans as geological and environmental agents. The research approach will combine historical inquiry, laboratory replications, and the comparative exploration of mining sites.
Francesco Luzzini will work at Johns Hopkins University (with prof. Lawrence Principe) and at Ca’ Foscari’s Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage (with prof. Pietro Omodeo).

Iryna Mykhailova

RENAISSANCE USSR – L’Umanesimo dietro la Cortina di ferro: studi sul Rinascimento italiano in Unione Sovietica

The main objective of project is to examine the Italian Renaissance Studies in the Soviet Union taken as an independent, but considerably isolated scholarly tradition, and to determine its place in the twentieth-century international discourse on Renaissance humanism and philosophy. The project seeks to comprehend why and how Italian Renaissance intellectual history was extensively studied in the Soviet Union, what was the contribution of the Soviet scholars to the field on the international level and to what extent it was informed by, on one hand, Western studies in the field, and, on the other hand, by the Soviet ideological context. Based on the archival papers located in Russia, Europe, and the United States, the project also aims to clarify how Soviet scholars, whose financial opportunities and academic mobility were significantly limited, participated in the international academic networks that is, on larger scale, how intellectual interchange between culturally and politically different academic communities took place.
Iryna Mykhailova will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari with prof. Marco Sgarbi and at the Department of History of Harvard University under supervision of prof. James Hankins.

Cecilia Muratori

PHYSIOGNOMONICA - Physiognomics as Philosophy: Reconceiving an Early Modern Practice

‘There’s no art/ To find the mind’s construction in the face’ declared King Duncan in Macbeth. According to early modern physiognomists, Shakespeare’s character was tragically mistaken. Physiognomics, understood as the theory that there is a direct connection between the inside and the outside of a living being, experienced a revival in early modernity. This project will lead to a comprehensive study of early modern physiognomics as a philosophical practice, and will involve the publication of a key manuscript source.
Cecilia Muratori will develop this project at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Marco Sgarbi, with a period of secondment at the Centre Alexandre Koyré in Paris, where she will work with prof. Catherine König-Pralong.

Annamaria Pazienza

In&Around - Patterns of land-use and human mobility in a time of climate changes (Italy, 6th to 11th cc.)

The period from the Sixth- to Eleventh- century in Italy is one of the most profound political and social laboratories in European history. Centred on this region and period, the In&Around project aims at exploring the interaction between climate variability and human agency with a lens towards management of the environment and in the light of shifting political regimes. By way of the innovation-through-interdisciplinary approach, it will combine new long-duration and high-resolution climate records from recently cored lake sediments in Rieti and Lucca (Central Italy) with data derived from written sources and already extant climate reconstructions, thus offering an important contribution to an expanding field of study, and capturing details on past issues of contemporary significance, like human mobility and workforce relocation.
Annamaria Pazienza will develop her research at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics of Ca’ Foscari with prof. Davide Zanchettin, and at History Department - College of Liberal Arts of the University of Nevada, Rena - US with prof. Edward Schoolman.

Tofik Ahmed Shifa

CoCaWS - Confined catalysis in layered materials - a transformational approach for efficient water splitting 

The issue of energy crisis has become a serious concern. The escalating CO2 level in the atmosphere is also equivalently concerning. Therefore, the development of sustainable energy sources is a tremendous help in the meeting of the global future energy need. CoCaWS aims at exploring new efficient catalysts for overall water splitting  to tackle the problem of global energy crisis through ecofriendly hydrogen production. Particular emphasis will be put on different kinds of layered materials (transition metal dichalchogenides - TMDS, and Metal phosphorous trichalcogenides - MPX3). These materials have attracted significant interest due to their promising energy applications and striking fundamental properties. Based on various strategies for performance enhancement on TMDS and some pioneering experimental works on MPX3, the researcher will also investigate the MPX3 family, exploring reaction mechanisms, properties of active sites, and etc.
Tofik Ahmed Shifa will develop his research at the Department of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems of Ca’ Foscari with prof. Alberto Vomiero.

Thea Sommerschield

PythiaPlus - Machine Learning for the Study of Ancient Epigraphic Cultures

PythiaPlus will explore the nature of the epigraphic cultures of the Greek and Roman worlds using recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. By revolutionising our ability to access and analyse the data through the implementation of Machine Learning models, this research will enable and undertake the interpretation of the epigraphic patterns and parallels discovered by the models across the texts and metadata of thousands of Greek and Latin inscriptions, transforming our understanding of epigraphic communication.
Thea Sommerschield will be working at the Department of Humanities of Ca’ Foscari (under the supervision of prof. Lorenzo Calvelli), and will collaborate with Google’s DeepMind in London, the Athens University of Economics and Business, and with the Digital Curation Unit of the IMIS Athena Research Centre.

Stefan Szwed

DemSupPra - Democracy Support Practice After the Third Wave: Adapting to Change?

DemSupPra aims to assess the significance and impact of three recent developments on the practices of international election observation and assistance: rapid technological change; ‘social learning’ by autocrats, which made assaults against democratic institutions including elections less visible (‘fake compliance’); and the use of the ballot box to ‘backslide’ or advance illiberal democracy (‘majoritarianism’). It asks how have these elements affected the two democracy support practices, and how have democracy supporters adapted to these developments? In doing so, the project also sets out to answer the policy relevant question, whether election observation and assistance are still fit for purpose.
Stefan Szwed will develop his project at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Matteo Legrenzi and at the Columbia University’s Harriman Institute.

Livia Tagliapietra

GISARC – Greek in Sicily after the Roman Conquest

When Sicily fell under Roman control in the third century BCE, Greek was the hegemonic language in the region. GISARC will investigate the linguistic effects of Roman domination in Sicily through the analysis of the surviving epigraphic texts and the application of an interdisciplinary perspective, which combines linguistic analysis of the texts and investigation of historical and archaeological data. In particular, GISARC will assess the use of Greek and Latin in different types of texts, and how the status and function of each language evolved during the period under examination; moreover, this research project will identify any differences in the use and survival of Greek in different areas of Sicily and contextualise any such differences in the light of historical data; last but not least, GISARC will describe the effects of language contact as evidenced in the epigraphic texts (namely, any influence of Latin on the use and evolution of the local Greek and vice versa).
Livia Tagliapietra will work in the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari under the supervision of prof. Olga Tribulato.

Robert Edmund Upton

GLOB-POP-NAT - Populist nationalism in 'global' western India, 1920-1939

The project critically evaluates the assumed historical connections between interwar European fascism and Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) as the latter emerged. Transnational in its nature, the project also exploits a vernacular and interdisciplinary regional study of Hindutva in its birthplace of Maharashtra in western India, and involves research hosted by the Netaji Institute for Asian Studies (India). Under the supervision of prof. Matteo Legrenzi at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari, the project aims at a better understanding of the transnational nature of the radical populist right in the interwar period at a global level, and through this it seeks a better understanding of radical right movements in comparative and historical perspective.

Matteo Vagelli

Epistyle - Style Matters: Scientific Pluralism and its Early-Modern Sources

This project aims to map a conceptual history of style that provides a genealogy of scientific pluralism and theories of style in the sciences. The concept of style, which has emerged as a central term in the epistemological and scientific fields, has received little critical attention. Scholarly discussions of style have been largely disparate, scattered across disciplines, and sustained analysis of its resonance and significance, especially for the sciences, is lacking. Attempting to address this gap, EPISTYLE advances the hypothesis that a specific link between style and knowledge established during the early modern period continues to have relevant conceptual force today. 
Matteo Vagelli will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari, at the Harvard Department of the History of Science, and at the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science. He will be supervised jointly by prof. Marco Sgarbi, prof. Peter Galison, and prof. Hasok Chang.

Bilge Yabanci

RESONATE - Designing Resonant Frames: How to Effectively Communicate about the Rights and Inclusion of Immigrants and Refugees?

Immigrant and refugee rights movements (IRRM) have lately shown success in offering temporary assistance and integration programs in numerous countries. However, they have mostly failed to respond to the societal backlash against immigrants and refugees. How can IRRMs communicate with societies better, alter hostile public opinion and promote rights for noncitizens? To answer this question, RESONATE will employ an innovative and solution-oriented approach that combines cutting-edge research methods with insights from sociology, cultural and communication studies and political science focusing on the case of the IRRM in Turkey
Bilge Yabanci will work at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca' Foscari with prof. Matteo Legrenzi and at the Northwestern University - Buffett Institute for Global Affairs with prof. Ipek Yosmaoglu.

Linda Zampol D'Ortia

EMOPractices - Emotions as Practice in the Early Modern Jesuit Missions in the Asia-Pacific

This project sets out to address the role of emotions in the early modern Jesuit missions. Applying a practice-based approach, it will analyse the emotional scripts embedded in manuscript and printed texts produced in the context of six Catholic missions in Asia and in the Pacific, to shed new light on these intercultural encounters and the connected emergence of the image of the Other.
After developing her project for two years at the Australian Catholic University, Linda Zampol D’Ortia will work at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca' Foscari under the supervision of prof. Giovanni Bulian.

Cristiano Zanetti

AUTOREN - Automata and Power in Renaissance Florence, Milan, and Venice (1400-1600)

Automata were, as pioneering art historian Eugenio Battisti observed, “perhaps the most abstract compositions of all occidental civilization”. Anthropomorphic, and especially cosmomorphic automata were among the most elaborate mechanical achievements of Renaissance Italy. They were not useful machines, but rather animated symbolic organisms that conveyed a multilayered intellectual message often undecipherable to our contemporary eye. This research project, at the crossroads of archaeometry and the historiographies of philosophy, art, science, and technology, focuses on the social, cultural and material history of symbolic machines in Renaissance Italy in the areas of Milan, Venice and Florence between 1400 and 1600.
Cristiano Zanetti will work at the California Institute of Technology with Prof. Mordechai Feingold, and at Ca' Foscari (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage) with prof. Marco Sgarbi. 

Last update: 23/04/2024