Giulia ZANON

Giulia Zanon is a social and cultural historian of early modern Italy and her research interests cross the field of history and history of art.

She hold a BA in Cultural Heritage (2011) and a MA in History and Geography of Europe (2014) from the University of Verona, Italy. In 2020, she obtained a PhD in History at the University of Leeds (UK). By using an interdisciplinary methodology, her doctoral dissertation explored the construction of middling sorts identity through the lens of social relationships and the commission of artworks in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice.
After her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds, working on post-Tridentine Catholic devotions in early modern Italy.

In 2022, she became post-doctoral fellow of the Institute of History of Art at the University Nova of Lisbon, working on the cross-cultural connections between Lisbon and Venice in the early modern period, by studying the circulation of people, material and visual cultures between the two cities across the Mediterranean Sea.

Her current research project at Ca’ Foscari, entitled ‘Devotions on the Move: The Circulation of the Cult of San Francesco di Paola in Early Modern Mediterranean’, 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 to the emergence of new cults of saints and the ways in which environment, lay piety, visual arts and patronage shaped devotions across the Republic of Venice, the Adriatic coasts and the Mediterranean, more broadly.