Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and a professor of historical epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage - Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His main areas of inquiry are Anthropocene philosophy, the material history of science in the longue durée, the cultural history of cosmology and the politics of epistemology. He is the author of "Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies" (2019). He co-edited, with C. Baldacci, S. Bassi and L. De Capitani, "Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide" (2022) and is the editor of two journal special issues on geoanthropology:

• with T. Asmussen, "Early Modern Geological Agency", in "Earth Science History" 39/2 (2020);
• with R. Garau and G. Rispoli, "Historical Geoanthropology", in the "Journal for the Interdisciplinary History of Ideas" 11/22 (2022).

He is the principal investigator of the FARE project EarlyGeoPraxis, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. He also leads the Max Planck Partner Group in Venice The Water City on Anthropocene Venice and the Waterscapes Unit at NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities in Venice.

Corinna Guerra Corinna Guerra is an Associate Professor in History of Science and Technology at Pegaso University and member of the Laboratoire UR-EST of the Paris-Saclay University (France). In Venice she had been teaching Environmental Humanities (2021-2026) and she created, and directed, the Winter School in Interdisciplinary Biodiversity financed by the NBFC. Her research focus is on the chemistry of the 18 th century, natural disasters and the relationship between geochemical peculiarities of a territory and the evolution of scientific disciplines. Her first book “Lavoisier e Parthenope” (Naples 2017) was awarded the Prize for Young Historians by the International Academy of the History of Science. She has been appointed among the 100 Italian (women) Experts for the History and Philosophy Area 100esperte.it [ITA].

Cristina Baldacci is associate professor in History of Contemporary Art at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage) and affiliated faculty member at NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities, where she leads the Ecological Art Practices research cluster and curates the Art Ecologies series. Her research interests focus mainly on Art and ecology; Art and photography in the Anthropocene; Archiving and collecting as artistic practices; Appropriation, montage and re-enactment in contemporary art. Along with other publications, Baldacci is the author of Archivi impossibili. Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea (2016), a monograph on archiving as artistic practice, and of the article An Archipelago of Ecological Care: Venice, Its Lagoon, and Contemporary Art, "Lagooscapes. The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities", vol. 3, no. 2(2023), pp. 321-333; the co-editor of the books Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (2022), Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide (2022), Venice, an Archipelago of Art and Ecologies (2025), and of the special issues Archiving the Anthropocene: New Taxonomies Between Art and Science, “Holotipus”, voll. 5-6 (2025), Green, “L’uomo nero”, vol. 22, no. 22-24 (2025). She co-directs the book series The Future Contemporary: Inquiries into Visual, Performing, and Media Arts (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari).

Emiliano Guaraldo is a researcher in Environmental Humanities at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His research focuses on the aesthetic, and political dimensions of extractivism, toxic contamination, and energy. He has explored the connections between visual and literary culture and the environmental humanities in some edited collections, including “Building Common Ground: Contemporary Visual Arts and Ecological Knowledges” (Venice University Press, 2023), “Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities” (Liverpool University Press, 2023; with Marco Malvestio and Daniel A. Finch-Race), and the upcoming special issue of Extrapolation, "Science Fictional Ecologies in Contemporary Art” (with Alison Sperling, 2026). With Federico Luisetti and Alice Iacobone he is the editor of “Istituire la vita” (Diaphanes, 2026). His latest article, “Petro-Modernity and the Racialized Politics of Extraction: ENI and the Making of the African Anthropocene” (California Italian Studies 2025), traces the continuities between ENI’s postwar developmentalist visual culture in Africa and the rhetoric of Italy’s current energy policy. Since 2021, he has been a member of the interdisciplinary research group Unruly Natures.

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

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

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

Giulia Gandolfi is a Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is part of the project The Water City, which examines the city and environments of Venice as a basis for historical and comparative studies of global geo-anthropological processes, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. She received her PhD in 2024 with a dissertation on Georges Canguilhem and political epistemology. Her research lies at the intersection of historical and political epistemology, with a particular focus on the social and political role of the life sciences and their epistemic transformations.

Francesco Luzzini is a historian of science. Formerly a Marie Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Johns Hopkins University, he is Assistant Professor at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Vercelli, Italy). His work focuses on the Earth and environmental sciences, natural philosophy, and medicine in Renaissance and early modern Europe, with forays into modern and contemporary contexts. He is Italian Editor for the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science. Francesco is equally interested in the practical side of the history of science and in the history of theories and intellectual networks with their social, philosophical, political, and religious implications. In recent years, he has grown especially interested in exploring how the debate on natural resources in early modern Europe influenced the development of natural philosophy, the Earth sciences, and the human-environment system. Currently, he is editing the open-access collection of bibliographic essays Historical Studies of Environment, Science, and Technology. Publication is expected in 2027

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

Justas Patkauskas is a researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He holds a PhD in Theory and Criticism and conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of critical theory, social studies, and conceptual history. His work focuses on society–nature metabolism, epistemic reproduction, and geo-bio-politics. A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship alumnus, he led the project on the “Hybrid Knowledge Society.”

 is a PhD student in the Sustainable Development and Climate Change joint program between IUSS Pavia and Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research explores the cultural experience of water through labour, with a particular focus on artisanal fishing in the Venice Lagoon as a case study to investigate political epistemology from below. She interrogates the concepts of heritage, commons, and labour from a diachronic perspective, aiming to valorize traditional, practical, community-based knowledge in shaping a more sustainable relationship with the environment and its inhabitants. As part of her project, she is collaborating with VeGAL (Eastern Veneto Development Agency) to support the candidacy of artisanal fishing for inclusion on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Krešimir Vuković is Assistant Professor at Charles University in Prague. He holds a doctorate in Classics from the University of Oxford. He was researcher at the University of Venice, the British School at Rome and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at LMU Munich. He is the author of Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives (Walter de Gruyter, 2022) on the role of non-human animals in ancient history. His research interests include ecocriticism, environmental humanities and storytelling. He is currently Principal Investigator of a project on ancient rivers in the wider Mediterranean world, funded by Primus programme at Charles University.

Noemi Quagliati is an art and visual historian working at the intersection of environmental humanities, the history of science and technology, and animal studies. She is a Max Weber Fellow in the Department of History at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and serves as the Principal Investigator of the research cluster “Ecologies of Making: Material Culture Beyond the Human” at the NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities in Venice. Previously, she was an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, leading the project “Bird's-Eye Views of the Venetian Lagoon: Planetary Visions and Birdscapes of an Aquatic Ecosystem”. She earned her PhD in Art History from LMU Munich and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, focusing on landscape photography in WWI Germany. Her scholarship has been published in journals like Transbordeur, Sophia Journal, Vulcan, AUC Geographica, and Lagoonscapes, and in volumes including Storytelling and Environmental History, Pasted Topographies, and Nomadic Camera. Noemi is also the co-organiser of the conference “Planetary Waters: A Challenge between Abstraction and Empathy”, hosted by the German Maritime Museum/Leibniz Institute of Maritime History in Bremerhaven, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume under the same title with Bloomsbury.

Omar Rodríguez is a historian and philosopher of science interested in the introduction and development of European thought, mainly Renaissance humanism, in the Ibero-American multicultural world. More specifically, he recovers the complex interrelationships between natural, religious and political notions in the conceptualization of the skies and territories in the Americas, especially in New Spain. At the same time, he has studied the history of civil engineering in Mexico, analysing the different interests behind public works. Currently, his research focuses on the study of the particularities of knowledge and practices in multicultural societies and its implications for their environments. He has written "Transformation and Persistence of the Basin-Valley of Mexico in the 16th and 17th Centuries" (2022), and “The Watershed of Mexico In Early Modernity. Cross Perspectives and Comparative Historical Hydropolitics” (2025). He collaborates with NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities, and the “Water City Project. The Political Epistemology of Hydrogeological Praxis”. He made a postdoctoral fellowship on "The Dispute for the Environment in the Valley of Mexico" within the FARE project "EarlyGeoPraxis" in Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Currently, he is undertaking a repatriation stay at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico with the project “Epistemological and ontological pluralism for the recovery of cultural heritage for eco-social resilience in the face of current challenges”.

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

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

Amalia Rossi is an MSCA Global Fellow at the Department of Asian and North African Studies (DSAAM) and at NICHE - Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She teaches Cultural Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, and Ecosophy at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan and Rome. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Anthropology (University of Milan-Bicocca), and is an expert in political ecology, Buddhist Studies, and the anthropology of social movements. She has conducted fieldwork in Italy and Thailand. Her publications include the monograph Eco-Buddhism. Forest Monks and Contested Landscapes in Thailand (Meltemi, 2022) and, with Stefano Boni and Alex Koensler, the essay Militant Ethnographies. Perspectives and Dilemmas (Meltemi, 2020). Since 2023, she has been following the work of IDRA (INIZIATIVA PER I DIRITTI DELLE RETI D'ACQUA) as a facilitator and coordinator in collaboration with NICHE-Ca'Foscari University of Venice, the Italian Buddhist Union (UBI), and Ocean Space/TBA21 Academy- Venice.

Meital Shai is an art and architecture historian specializing in intersections of art and science in Early Modern Veneto, with a focus on the history of astronomy and environmental practices. She holds a BA and MA in Art History from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Theories and History of the Arts from the joint doctorate program of Ca’ Foscari and IUAV Universities of Venice, Venice International University (VIU), and the School for Advanced Studies in Venice Foundation (SSAV). She has recently concluded a research fellowship at Ca’ Foscari University, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, within the FARE project “EarlyGeoPraxis,” examining water and land management in Early Modern Venice. Her research explores environmental conditions shaping artistic and cultural production in Venice and its mainland territories, with attention to microhistory. Her publications include The Cosmos at Home: The Fresco Cycle of Villa Grimani Molin at Fratta Polesine (Zamorani, 2019), “Faith in Science Triumphant: An Eclipse in Villa Barbaro at Maser” (Artibus et Historiae, 2021), and the forthcoming The Social Life of a River: Governing the Meolo in Early Modern Venice (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2026).