Stefano DALL'AGLIO

I am Associate Professor of early modern history at Ca' Foscari, where I am the vice-director of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities and the coordinator of the Master's degree programme in Digital and Public Humanities.

I am a political and religious historian of early modern Italy. I hold a PhD from Sapienza University in Rome and I was awarderd fellowships at many prestigious institutions (Villa I Tatti-the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation of Geneva, the Newberry Library of Chicago, the USTC Project at the University of St Andrews, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University). From 2006 to 2010 I was a Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena Fellow at the Medici Archive Project and from 2011 to 2015 I was a Research Fellow in the ERC project ‘Italian Voices’ at the University of Leeds. I have given invited papers in many prestigious places, including the Accademia dei Lincei, Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Warburg Institute in London. 

I have published widely on political and religious dissent in Renaissance Florence and Italy, with a specific focus on Girolamo Savonarola and sixteenth-century Savonarolism, and political opposition to the Medici. My fields of interest include the relationship between orality and writing, information networks and circulation of fake news, and alteration and manipulation of historical narratives. My books include 'Vulnera diligentis', 'Savonarola in Francia', 'L'eremita e il sinodo', 'Savonarola and Savonarolism', and 'L'assassino del duca', while my edited volumes are 'Oral Culture in Early Modern Italy', 'Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society', and 'Storie nascoste'. My monograph 'The Duke’s Assassin. Exile and Death of Lorenzino de’ Medici' (Yale University Press, 2015) won the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize awarded by the American Historical Association. My article ‘Voices under Trial. Inquisition, Abjuration, and Preachers' Orality in Sixteenth-Century Italy’ (Renaissance Studies, 2017) was awarded a honorable mention by the Society for Renaissance Studies. I am currently working with the Medici Archive Project on a newly discovered corpus of letters written by the prince and cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici to his agent in Rome Ottavio Falconieri.

My interests include Public History and Digital Humanities. I believe in the importance of making history with and for the public and I am keen to take my research beyond the academia and reach different publics, also by using the 'new technologies'. I have written several articles in magazines for general readers both in Italian and in English, as well as blog posts and essays and entries for exhibition catalogues. I featured as a leading expert in podcasts and documentaries that were broadcast on TV and radio in Italy, France, Germany and the UK. I contributed to the organization of some exhibitions, I have organized public lectures for the general audience. I am currently working on the digital online database of a corpus of seventeenth-century letters in collaboration with the Medici Archive Project.