Meet the Fellows

SENIOR FELLOWS

Sid and Ruth Lapidus Curatorial Fellow 2022-23

After a Master’s degree at the École du Louvre, Alice S. Legé obtained her PhD in Art History in June 2020, with a thesis on the residences and the collections of the Cahen d’Anvers family (supervisors Ph. Sénéchal, Univ. Amiens / G. Agosti, Univ. Milan). Lecturer at the University of Rome 3 (History of Architecture), she is member of the International Council of Museum (ICOM) and affiliated researcher of the Jewish Country Houses project at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the relationship between residences and collections, historical gardens and Jewish patronage in the nineteenth century. She also has an established publishing history about Renaissance Medals. Three advanced training courses in cultural management (Luiss Business School and Gallerie d’Italia Academy) and computer science for heritage preservation (Polytechnic University of Milan) complete her technical skills. In the last years she collaborated with the Louvre Museum, the Spada Gallery in Rome, the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the Royal Palace of Caserta. Here and elsewhere, she worked with an international network of colleagues and patrons, participating in preventive conservation actions and exhibition projects. As a free-lance curator, she specialized in collection management and inventories check.

Mila Fumini

NEH Avviso Project Fellow 2022-23

Mila Fumini is currently a research fellow at the SAGAS department of the University of Florence within the PRIN Sacrifice in the Europe of the religious conflicts and in the early modern world: comparisons, interpretations, legitimations. Graduated in Philosophy in Bologna and then received her PhD in History at University of Trento, she is scholar of archives of the modern age. She has dealt mainly with religious ego-documents, turning her attention to the phenomenology of Catholic mysticism between the medieval and modern ages. For the past few years, she has been delving into the study of digital humanities: she has been part of two national research projects, in Turin and Bologna, for which she designed and implemented the related data-bases, digital libraries and web platforms. Her research focuses on both theoretical and material aspects of mystical-ecstatic phenomena, women’s writings, and textual accounts of the semi-cultured literature. She is the author of RAGU-Research and Archives of Gastronomic Uses, a project undertaken with the goal of digitizing and studying the kitchen notebooks of postwar families.

Gaston J. Basile

NEH Avviso Project Fellow 2022-23

Gaston J. Basile is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and professor at the postgraduate school at the University of Buenos Aires. His research interests include the genesis of Greek scientific discourse, the Italian humanists’ intellectual engagement with Greek and Latin texts and, most recently, the theory and practice of translation in the Italian Quattrocento with a special focus on scientific texts. His forthcoming book examines the role of translation and interpretation in the development of scientific knowledge in fifteenth-century Italy. Before joining the MAP, he was Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Italian Renaissance (2021-2022), Erasmus/Henri Crawford Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London (2019), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Visiting Scholar at the Institut für Klassische Philologie, Humbodlt-Universität (2018), Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Buenos Aires (2015-2017), and Visiting Professor at the “Dipartimento di Teoria e Documentazione delle Tradizioni Culturale”, Università degli Studi di Siena (2016 and 2011). His latest publications have appeared in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, Arts et Savoirs, Medievalia e Humanistica, and the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies.

Clément Godbarge

NEH Avviso Project Fellow 2021-22

Clément Godbarge is an NEH research fellow at the AVVISO project. His interests revolve around science and statecraft in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean. In his forthcoming book, he examines how doctors embedded at the courts of sixteenth-century France and Italy renewed the languages of politics, promoting themselves as political experts of a new genre. His research has been supported by Harvard University, The Warburg Institute in London, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the Renaissance Society of America.

Oscar Schiavone

NEH Avviso Project Fellow 2021-22

After his studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Laurea, 2005), University of Florence and University of Bonn (PhD, 2009) and UCL (PhD, 2015), Oscar Schiavone became a Teaching Fellow first at UCL and then at Durham University. His research aims to understand how early modern civilisation articulated its identity and self-perception through cultural systems (e.g., the system of the arts; the relationship between social and cultural change) and the manipulation of information (e.g., political communication; cultural propaganda; reception / translation). Oscar’s first book, which received the ‘Giuseppe Giusti / Opera Prima’ award in 2014, looked at Michelangelo’s artistic and literary productions aiming to define the inner nucleus of his imaginative world in a neuro-aesthetic framework. Through the reconstruction of Luca Martini’s career as a polymath and a bureaucrat stationed in Pisa, Oscar’s second book (forthcoming) will connect literature, art, and politics looking at how culture contributed to creating the image of Medici power while shedding light on the ‘Florentinisation’ of Tuscan cultural identity. Future research will investigate migration to highlight how ideas of belonging, cultural identification, and difference emerged in early modern Tuscany. Oscar’s recent scholarly work includes an edited volume on Michelangelo’s sculpture, a chapter in Brill’s Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici as well as entries in exhibition catalogues and articles in international refereed journals (e.g., International Journal of Maritime History, Studi Rinascimentali, Modern Language Review). Finally, Oscar is the editorial coordinator of Albertiana, the journal of the Societé Internationale Leon Battista Alberti.

Davide Baldi Bellini

Book History Fellow 2021-22

Davide Baldi Bellini is an adjunct professor at the University of Florence. His research interests center on the transmission of Greek and Latin texts as well as on Byzantine culture and Renaissance Humanism. He was a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2013-2014), a Post-Doc Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2014-2015), and a Research Assistant for Western Manuscripts at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon (2016-2019). His scholarly work has been published in a number of international refereed journals and by leading academic publishers. His most important publications include: Il ‘Codex Florentinus’ del Digesto e il fondo Pandette (Segno e testo, 2010); Etymologicum Symeonis gamma-epsilon (Brepols, 2013); Sub voce etymologia (Revue d’histoire des textes, 2014); Le editiones di Prisciano e i graeca (Georg Olms Verlag, 2014); Atanasio. Vita di Antonio (Città nuova, 2015); Il greco a Firenze e Pier Vettori (1499-1585) (Ed. dell’orso, 2015); The Young Amerigo Vespucci’s Latin Exercises (Humanistica Lovaniensia, 2016); I Documenti del Concilio di Firenze e quasi sei secoli di storia (Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 2017); ‘O filii et filiae’: testo, melodia e Fortleben (Rivista internazionale di Musica sacra, 2018); Ringmann, Waldseemüller and the Philological Cosmography of the New World (Peter Lang, 2018); Aldo Manuzio e le peculiarità greche: le abbreviazioni (Ledizioni, 2019); and Pier Vettori: Philologist and Professor (Brill, 2021).

Anton Serdeczny

Senior Project Fellow 2021-22

Anton Serdeczny, doctor of History of the EPHE (2014, Sorbonne Paris, codirected by Ludwik Stomma), has taught modern history in Marne-la-Vallée, Neuchâtel, Moscow, and Aix-Marseille, and has been a visiting researcher at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, at the European University Institute in Florence and at the University of Erfurt. His work focuses on the interactions between religion, culture and science, particularly on the links between oro-ritual culture, especially carnival, and early modern medicine. He is the author of Du tabac pour le mort. Une histoire de la réanimation, published by Champ Vallon (2018), a book that examines the atypical development of medical reanimation in the early modern period, as an involuntary scholarly re-elaboration of carnivalesque rites and representations of resurrection. His current research addresses the role of the European oral and ritual cultural substratum in elites, and more specifically in the systems of representations related to intersex in the modern period. He is also organizing an experimental, collaborative, academic cell with Algerian academics to study the circulation of oral tales and motifs on either side of the Mediterranean.

EVA SCHLER FELLOWS 2022-3

André Rocco
Eva Schler Fellow 2022-23

André Rocco holds two Master’s degrees in History (one in research focus, obtained with the highest distinction, the other in teaching focus), obtained at the University of Liège in 2020. His thesis – based on unpublished correspondence kept in the Mediceo del Principato at the Archivio di Stato in Florence – examines the political and artistic role of the Florentine ambassador Averardo Seristori (1497-1569). To do so, he participated in January 2018 in a “Winter Seminar in Paleography & Archival Studies” organized by the Medici Archive Project. Since then, he has maintained strong ties with our institute and, in particular, participated in the testing phase of the MIA database before its public launch. After having worked as an archivist for the project « EpistolarITA. Lettere italiane dell’Età moderna », his research interests now focus on the diplomatic and artistic relations between the Medici and the Este in the second half of the Cinquecento.

Anna Speyart
Eva Schler Fellow 2022-23

Anna Speyart is a PhD candidate in history of science at Princeton University and works on early modern scientific culture in Europe. Her research focuses on the history of ice and snow in early modern Europe and traces the trajectories of these ephemeral products from harvest to use in scientific, medical, and consumer contexts. Anna has previously worked on intellectual sociability and play in sixteenth-century Italy. At MAP, she will research the history of the Florentine cold network in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Michela Young
Eva Schler Fellow 2022-23

Michela Young received her undergraduate degree in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018, and an MPhil in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2019. She is currently a third-year doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge researching the presence of the Vallombrosan congregation in Florence during the Quattrocento. Working with unpublished archival material, her thesis offers a microhistory of the Florentine neighbourhood surrounding the Vallombrosan churches of Santa Trinita and San Pancrazio, exploring the social and artistic relationships that characterised the area, and their impact upon the artistic and architectural fabric of the churches. Michela’s broader interests include Florentine social networks of patronage, as well as the relationships between artworks, their spatial setting, and devotional practices within the church interior.

Lavinia Gambini
Eva Schler Fellow 2022-23

Lavinia Gambini is a second-year PhD student in History at the University of Cambridge. After obtaining a BA in History and Philosophy from Humboldt-University in Berlin (2020), she graduated from Jesus College, University of Cambridge, with an MPhil in Early Modern History (2021). Her PhD project explores the encounter with Greek crafts and knowledge in late-Renaissance Italy. Focusing on places of coexistence such as Livorno or the Maremma, Lavinia investigates how early modern people appreciated and sought the expertise of their Greek contemporaries, especially in the medical sphere. Lavinia joined MAP as an Eva Schler Fellow in September-November 2022 to conduct archival research on Greek healers, scientific experts, and artisans in early modern Tuscany. The BIA database has helped her detect the presence of Greek astrologers and experts at the Medici court. Lavinia was awarded a Gurnee Hart MPhil Scholarship (2020) and is currently a scholar of the Cambridge International Trust. In summer 2023, she will join the German Study Centre in Venice as a predoctoral scholar in residence.

SAMUEL H. KRESS FELLOWS 2022-3

Flavia Barbarini
Samuel H. Kress Fellow 2022-23

Flavia Barbarini is a PhD candidate in Art History at Temple University (supervisor Dr. Marcia B. Hall). She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Bologna and her postgraduate degree at the University of Padua where she specialized in early modern drawings with a dissertation on the profane drawings of Giuseppe Porta Salviati. As a Kress Fellow at MAP, Flavia is working on her doctoral dissertation dedicated to the market and the circulation of drawings in sixteenth-century Italy, with a special focus on Niccolò Gaddi’s network and collection. Before beginning her fellowship at MAP, Flavia conducted research in Rome thanks to the Temple Rome Fellowship. Her research has also been supported by the International PhD Fellowship at NIKI, the Summer Research Grant of the Graduate Board of Temple University, and the Art History Research Award of Temple University.

Julie James
Samuel H. Kress Fellow 2022-23

Julie James is a doctoral candidate at Washington University in Saint Louis specializing in Italian Renaissance Art. She earned her B.A. in History and Classics in 2013 from the University of Delaware, and obtained her M.A. degree in 2017 from Syracuse University in Florence with her master’s thesis, entitled “Bedding Agostino Chigi: Sodoma’s The Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne in the Villa Farnesina.” While her dissertation focuses on the iconography of Sienese illustrious men in an attempt to better understand how the Sienese utilized and activated this particular genre both at home and throughout Italy, her work at MAP centers on the work of Suor Theresa Berenice Vitelli and her artistic and scientific networks throughout Tuscany.

VISITING FELLOWS 2022-3

Kyna Hamill
Visiting Senior Fellow 2023

Kyna Hamill received her PhD in Theatre History from Tufts University and she is currently the Director of Boston University’s Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum and a Master Lecturer. She works on the intersection of visual culture and theatre and has published essays on fencing history, baroque stage properties, and Jacques Callot’s theatrical prints. An upcoming chapter in “The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe” (Brepols) is entitled “Telescopes and Omnipotent Views in Jacques Callot’s La Fiera dell’Impruneta.” Hamill’s work at MAP will focus on the formative years that Callot spent in Florence between 1612-21 under patronage of Cosimo II. Her research here is part of a broader book project on Callot’s influence on the historiography of the commedia dell’arte tradition.

Florence Forte
Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship 22-23

Florence Forte is currently a PhD student at the Warburg Institute in London, on a one-year studentship at MAP funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She graduated with first-class honours from Nottingham (BA, Classics) followed by a PGCE at King’s College London and most recently, an MA in Cultural, Intellectual and Visual History with distinction from the Warburg Institute (2022). Her PhD project examines Isotta Nogarola’s Latin disputation on the relative sin of Adam and Eve (c. 1451) and its context, with a strong focus on new and old primary material. Besides this, Florence’s general interests include: the transmission of classical texts/images, fifteenth-century humanists and their educations, canon formation, interpretations of Genesis, dissenting voices and women’s writing (1400–1700). In her spare time, Florence organises courses and cultural events in Italy promoting the classical tradition with wider audiences via Forte Academy.