Founding members
Giorgia Proietti
Coordinator of the LIMS
Assistant Professor in Greek History at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento, where she teaches both Greek History and Memory Studies.
She has studied in Athens and London, obtained her PhD in Trento (2014), and held postdoctoral fellowships in Edinburgh and Genève. Her research interests mainly focus on ancient Greek history, epigraphy, and topography, on the one hand, and comparative history, on the other. Concerning the former, she is particularly interested in 5th century Athenian history, especially in war and war-related phenomena, and their different means of representation and memorialization (historiography, inscriptions, monuments, space, rituals, divination, oracles, and public discourse). Concerning the latter, she is especially interested in the commemoration of war, war trauma, and post-war collective emotions in a comparative perspective between antiquity and today. In both fields of research, her theoretical and methodological background is deeply affected by a socio-anthropological approach, as well as memory and identity studies. She also cultivates an interest in the methodology of historical research, the relationship between memory and history, issues of public history, contested sites of memory, decolonization, and cancel culture. She has published extensively on natonal and international journals and edited volumes, and she has co-edited herself four books concerning the memory of war (the last one, ‘Commemorating war and war dead. Ancient and modern’, was published by Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart in 2019). Her first monograph ‘Prima di Erodoto. Aspetti della memoria delle Guerre Persiane’ (with a preface by N. Luraghi) was published in 2021 as a Hermes Einzelschrift (Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart). In April 2021, she obtained the ‘ASN-Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale‘ as an Associate Professor in Greek History.
Giuseppe Sciortino
Giuseppe Sciortino is Full Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. He is a faculty fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology and among the coordinators of the Civil Sphere Theory Working Group (https://www.cstnetwork.org/about). His main research interests are at the crossroads between sociological theory and cultural analysis. Among his works, Great Minds. Encounters with Social Theory (with Gianfranco Poggi, Stanford University Press, 2011), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization. Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination (edited with Ron Eyerman, Palgrave, 2019) and Populism in the Civil Sphere (edited with J.C. Alexander and Peter Kivisto, Polity, 2021). He is currently working, with Martina Cvajner, on a cultural history of the sexual revolution.
Maurizio Giangiulio
Full Professor in Greek History at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento, and Professor in Epigraphy and Greek Antiquities at the Italian Archaeological School of Athens. He is also a member of the European Network for the study of Ancient Greek History. He has published extensively on the Western Greeks, Pythagoreanism, Herodotus, oral tradition and social memory, Greek oracles, the polis and democracy in the Greek world. Among his latest books are Introduzione alla Storia Greca (Bologna 2021); Magna Grecia: una storia mediterranea (Roma 2021); Demokratie in der griechischen Antike. Athen, Unteritalien, Sizilien, Darmstadt 2022.
Among his co-edited volumes are Commemorating War and War Dead. Ancient and Modern (Stuttgart 2019, with G. Proietti and E. Franchi), and Atene, vivere in una città antica (Roma 2023, with M. Bettalli).
Andrea Cossu
Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and social research in the University of Trento.
He places his research work at the intersection of Cultural Sociology, Historical Sociology, and Sociological Theory. His specific areas of research are political culture in Republican Italy (post-1945), and especially the conflicts that emerge in the production of memory cultures. Over the years, he has developed an interest in the sociology of the arts and the dynamics of artistic reputations. In 2012, he published a book on Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity, looking at the ways artistic reputation can be approached from a perspective that integrates Performance Studies, Cultural Sociology, and contributions from the sociology of the arts. Finally, he works on topics related, broadly, to social semiotics and the legacy of structuralism in cultural sociology. He was a LIMS member until Dec. 2023.
Thomas Van de Putte
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s College London. He works on questions of cultural and collective Holocaust memory, combining perspectives from sociology, linguistics and cultural studies.
Thomas worked previously at Nottingham Trent University, the Université Catholique de Louvain and the University of Trento. His work is published in the most prominent journals of memory studies, Holocaust studies and narrative studies. He published his first monograph, Contemporary Auschwitz/Oswiecim, in 2021 with Routledge. Thomas’ second monograph, Outsourcing the European Past, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024.
Even though he is not working at the University of Trento anymore, he constantly collaborates with the LIMS activities.
Members
UniTN members
Claudio Biagetti
Research Fellowship Holder at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento, in the framework of the ERC Project FeBo. Federalism and Border Management in Greek Antiquity (P.I. Elena Franchi).
He holds a PhD in Greek History from the University of Roma Tre and the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. He was Research Assistant at the University of Hamburg (2017) and wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at WWU Münster in the framework of the DFG Project Schriftkultur und Wirtschaftsleben im spätantiken Ephesos. Neue Ostraka und Inschriften auf Gebrauchskeramik (2019-2022, P.I. Patrick Sänger). He was Adjunct Lecturer at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum (2017-2022, Pontifical Lateran University). He holds the ASN (National Scientific Qualification) as Associate Professor both in Classical Philology (2020) and Ancient History (2022). He was granted a research fellowship by the Jacobi Foundation (Munich, 2011) and a postdoctoral fellowship by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation (WWU Münster, 2013-2015). He was Visiting Researcher at the Laboratoire AOrOc of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2020) and at the Laboratoire Erasme of the Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès, in the framework of the ERC Project MAP. Mapping Ancient Polytheisms (P.I. Corinne Bonnet). Since 2007 he has taken part in the activities of different archaeological teams working in Asia Minor. He is author of two books (Genos, Ethnos, Basileia. Intersezioni fra mito e identità nella letteratura storica sui Messeni, München 2018; Corpus dei Papiri Storici greci e latini. Parte A – Storici greci. Testi storici anepigrafi. Frammenti storici attribuiti a Teopompo di Chio, Pisa-Roma 2019) and several papers on Greek history, epigraphy and papyrology.
Gabriele D’Ottavio
Gabriele D’Ottavio is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. He holds a PhD in Modern History from Bologna University (2009). Throughout his academic career he has held several visiting positions at International academic institutions: Humboldt University in Berlin (2005/06); European University Institute in Florence (2009/2010), Goethe-University in Frankfurt a.M. (2015), Leibniz-Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (2019), Leibniz-Institute for European History in Mainz (2021), European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2023). In 2019, he was awarded the Ladislao Mittner Prize by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He is also a member of the Doctoral Board ‘European Cultures: Environments, Spaces, Histories, Arts and Ideas’ at the University of Trento and a Research Associate at the Italian-German Historical Institute of the Bruno Kessler Foundation. He has widely published on the political and cultural history of Germany, Italy and Europe in the twentieth century, on the history of European Integration, on the history of historiography, and on the history of epistemic communities in the field of the social sciences. He is currently chair holder of the Jean Monnet project COTPA – Contesting the Past of the EU: The Uses of History in (De-)Legitimating Narratives (2024 -2027).
Tiziana Faitini
Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy and the History of Political Thought at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento.
Previously, she was a MWK COFUND International Research Fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien in Erfurt and a Postdoc Fellow at the Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz. Her last book Shaping the Profession: Towards a Genealogy of Professional Ethics (Brill-Schöning 2023) is the most recent result of her research on the concept of work and the figure and memory of the professional in a transforming world of work.
Mail: tiziana.faitini@unitn.it
Elena Franchi
Full Professor in Greek History at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento.
She was granted a postdoctoral fellowship (Freiburg i. Breisgau, 2011-2013) and a fellowship at the level of an experienced researcher by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Muenster, 2020-2022). She also received a Europefellowship (Kalapodi and Delphi) in 2012. Beyond that, she is a member of the international network Historiai. Geschichtsschreibung und Vergangenheitsvorstellungen (since 2012) and research associate at the Waterloo Institute of Hellenistic Studies (Canada; since 2018). In 2021, she won two starting grants from the University of Trento. One year later, she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant with the project “FeBo: Federalism and Border Management in Greek Antiquity” (ERC 2021 COG PR. Nr. 101043954). The project focuses on the management strategies Greek federal states developed with regard to border areas. She has published one monograph (Die Konflikte zwischen Thessalern und Phokern. Krieg und Identität in der griechischen Erinnerungskultur des 4. Jahrhunderts, München 2016) and numerous articles on the border conflicts between Sparta and Argos, the Thessalian-Phokian wars and koina. She is a member of the scientific committee of the journal Teiresias. Online Review and Bibliography of Boiotian Studies, and since 2017 she is a member of the Cambridge Scholars Publishing Advisory Board (Classics section).
Mail: elena.franchi@unitn.it
Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel
Adjunct Professor at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento, where she teaches Museology and Iconography and Iconolog. Ph.D. in the History of Art (The Johns Hopkins University), her primary field of interest and research is Italian Renaissance, with particular emphasis on Marian iconography, a subject on which she has published a number of essays and articles, and curated two exhibitions: AVE EVA. Ein wiederentdecktes Hauptwerk des Renaissance Meister Guillaume de Marcillat (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, December 8, 2013 – May 13, 2014), and ANNA, la madre di Maria. Culto e iconografia nel Tirolo storico (Trent, Museo Diocesano Tridentino, October 1 – December 10, 2021). Recently she has co-authored the critical edition of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice. Lives of Francesco Francia and Lorenzo Costa (London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2022). Her second field of research and publication is Museum Studies: since she has been living between Italy and Germany for the last thirty years, working as correspondent from Berlin for Il Giornale dell’arte and The Art Newspaper, she has published extensively on the development of the museum landscape in Berlin and former GDR regions after Reunification, as well as on the ongoing debate about the restitution of both Nazi-looted art and cultural property illicitly transferred during colonialism.
Ester Gallo
Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the Department of Sociology and social research in the University of Trento.
Since 2019, she is the National Co-coordinator of Scholars at Risk Italy and member of SAR International Advisory Committee on Academic Freedom. Before joining the University of Trento in 2016, she held research and teaching positions at the European University Institute-RSCAS, Gediz University, University of Edinburgh, University of Perugia and the University of Sussex. Her research interests include migration and gender, religious diversity and pluralism, colonial history and memory, kinship and class inequality, with specific reference to Southern Europe and South Asia. She has edited Migration and Religion in Europe: Comparative Perspectives on South Asian Experiences (Routledge, 2016). She is the author of The Fall of the Gods: Kinship, Memory and Middle Classes in South India (Oxford University Press, 2017). She co-authored with Francesca Scrinzi Migrant Men, Masculinities and Reproductive Labor: Men of the Home (Palgrave MacMillan 2016). Her current research focuses on forced migration and academic displacement, and on refugee access to higher education.
Mail: ester.gallo@unitn.it
Antoine Houlou-Garcia
Holder of a doctorate in Political Studies (EHESS, Paris, France), Antoine Houlou-Garcia is an associated researcher at EHESS and teaches at the University of Trento. A mathematician by education, he specialized in the history of mathematics and the history of the use of mathematics in political theory. He recently published Il était une fois le zéro (Alisio, 2023) and Et la pomme ne tomba pas sur la tête de Newton (Albin Michel, 2024).
Mail: ester.gallo@unitn.it
Sofia Graziani
Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento.
Mail: sofia.graziani@unitn.it
Greta Perletti
Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary discourse, with a special emphasis on the intertwining between literary and medical discourse in Victorian culture. In this field she has published a monograph about the representations of consumption across medicine and literature in the long nineteenth century (Il mal gentile. La malattia polmonare nell’immaginario moderno, Bergamo University Press, 2012) as well as several articles and essays in book collections. Her research also has a strong focus on the representations of memory in medical and literary discourse: beside a monograph (Le ferite della memoria. Il ritorno dei ricordi nella cultura vittoriana, Bergamo University Press, 2008), she has published essays and articles about the pervasive presence of the dysfunctions of memory in Shakespeare’s plays and early modern culture well as in some Victorian scientific and literary works (among the authors considered: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy).
Mail: greta.perletti@unitn.it
Luca Pes
Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law in the University of Trento.
Mail: luca.pes@unitn.it
Rosa Miriam Salzberg
Associate Professor in Modern History at the Department of Sociology and social research in the University of Trento, having previously taught in Australia and the U.K. She has published widely on the history of migration, mobility, communication and urban history in early modern Europe. Among other themes, she teaches public history and memory with a particular focus on different forms and practices of commemoration in urban space. She has also worked with other colleagues on the smartphone applications Hidden Trento and Hidden Venice, historical walking tours which aim to engage contemporary audiences with lesser known aspects of these cities’ histories and urban fabrics. Her most recent publications include The Renaissance on the Road: Migration, Mobility and Cultural Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and La città di carta: Stampa effimera e cultura urbana nella Venezia del Rinascimento (Officina Libraria, 2023).
Mail: rosa.salzberg@unitn.it
Umberto Tulli
Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento. He works primarily on the history of the Cold War and the history of human rights in the 20th century. On these topics, he has published extensively. Among his most recent publications: A Precarious Equilibrium. Human Rights and Détente in Jimmy Carter’s Soviet Policy (Manchester University Press, 2020), “Wielding the human rights weapon against the American empire: the second Russell Tribunal and human rights in transatlantic relations” (Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 2021) and, together with Sara Lorenzini and Ilaria Zamburlini, the volume The Human Rights Breakthrough of the 1970s (Bloomsbury, 2022). Currently, he is P.I. of the research project “Returning Foreign Fighters.The Demobilisation of Italian Transnational War Volunteers, 1860s-1970s” and vice P.I. for the research project “Political Repression and International Solidarity Networks”. As a historian of the contemporary era, he is interested in the multifaceted relationship between political history and memory studies.
Mail: umberto.tulli@unitn.it
Manuela Valle
Teaching Fellow at the Department of Humanities in the University of Trento.
PhD in Philosophy, she is a teacher of History and Philosophy at the A. Rosmini high school in Rovereto (Italy) and collaborates with the University of Trento, where her Disciplinary Area is History of Ancient Philosophy. For Loffredo she published Un’antica discordia. Platone e la poesia: Ione, Simposio, Repubblica, Sofista (2016). She is a Member and Advisor of the Rovereto Accademia degli Agiati. Her research focuses on Plato and Platonism.
Mail: manuela.valle@unitn.it
Non UniTN LIMS friends
Alessia Bellusci
Assistant Professor in Jewish Culture at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Cà Foscari University of Venezia.
She is a historian of Hebrew culture who specializes in medieval Jewish thought, manuscript culture, and lived religion. Working at the intersection of history, religion and cultural anthropology, she
studies the production and transmission of technical knowledge in pre-modern Judaism and the history of Jewish magic. After receiving a PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2017, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Library of Israel, was a Blaustein postdoctoral associate in medieval Jewish history and lecturer in religious studies at Yale University, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellow at Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation and forthcoming book was awarded the Shai Bleimann recognition by the Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel in 2018.
Marco Ferrario
Marco Ferrario earned a Ph.D. in Ancient History in 2023 from the Universities of Trento and Augsburg with a dissertation exploring the local and trans-regional entanglement of economy, politics, and society across Achaemenid Northeastern Central Asia, with a special focus on Baktria and Sogdiana. His main research interests include the history of the Īrānian world during the 1st Millennium BCE, Herodotus in his Ancient Near Eastern intellectual contexts, anthropology of (sacred) kingship, and the comparative history of Empire. He has published extensively on national and international journals.
Francesco Frizzera
Francesco Frizzera (b. 1985) studied at the University of Trento (Italy). In 2016 he got his PhD with a research project on Trentino’s refuges in Austria-Hungary and in Italy during the WWI. Between November 2016 and June 2020, he was wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Germany) with a research project on food and agricultural policies in Germany (1914-1933), led by prof. Gustavo Corni. He is currently research partner of the project Hunger draws the Map. Blockade and Food Shortages in Europe, 1914-1922 (Oxford University) and starting from January 2019 he is Director of the Italian War History Museum in Rovereto (Italy).
Francesco Mazzucchelli
Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Communication and researcher at CUE, the International Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Umberto Eco”. He has been awarded research fellowships at several Universities/Institutes, where he has spent research and teaching periods: NIAS, UvA University of Amsterdam, VU Amsterdam, University of Uppsala-Gotland, University of Manchester, Université de Limoges, Fondation Maison Sciences de l’Homme.
His research deals mainly with cultural semiotics and processes of construction/transmission of collective memory.
From September 2021, he is the Director of TraMe, Centre for the Semiotic Study of Memory.
He is one of the three Vice-Presidents of AISS, Italian Association of Semiotic Studies.
Hannes Obermair
Historian and Senior Researcher (Philosopher-in-Residence) at Eurac Research in Bozen/Bolzano. He researches cultural and public history and developed the contentious Monumento to Victory in Bolzano into a permanent exhibition on the impact of fascism and nazism upon the South Tyrolean region which has been granted a special commendation by the EMYA in 2016. A member of the Accademia degli Agiati and the Royal Historical Society, he co-curated exhibitions on the colonial past (The Ethiopian Cloak, Villa Freischütz in Meran/o, 2021/22) and published inter alia “Mythen der Diktaturen – Miti delle dittature (2019), “Grossdeutschland ruft!” (2021), “Camicie nere in Alto Adige” (2023), and “Blicke von aussen – Blicke von innen“ (2024).
Mario Panico
Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow in Semiotics at the Faculty of Humanities at in the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches Heritage and Memory Theory. His research deals with the representations and mediation of perpetrators in memory museums and trauma sites in Europe and Latin America. He has published on the relationship between monumentality and conflict; heritage, nostalgia and urban practices; and family memories and the theory of implication. His next monograph will be titled “Space for Nostalgia. Difficult Memories, Spatial Consolation and Conflict Heritage” (Palgrave Macmillan).
Mail: m.panico@uva.nl
Giovanna Rech
Teaching Assistant in Sociology of Religion at the University of Verona. She is a sociologist of religions and her research areas concern spiritual mobility and religious cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, in increasingly plural contexts. Her doctoral training in France was based on the classics and the analysis of contemporary religious forms – such as popular religion – was oriented towards the study of the relationship between tradition and history and collective memory. Her qualitative sociological approach questions the social uses of religious and historical heritage and heritagisation as a process of change and production of memory within religions, spirituality and society at large. She is currently working on spiritual, religious and cultural sustainability and the role of cultural mediation of places of worship in Catholicism and some religious minorities, in Italy and France.
Mail: giovanna.rech@univr.it
Sandra Toffolo
Researcher in Modern History at the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico / Italian-German Historical Institute in Trento (Italy). Her research focuses on mobility, space, and the circulation of people, objects, and ideas in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on Venice. Her current project focuses on foreign pilgrims in early modern Venice. She is particularly interested in their local, national, and transnational networks, and in their role in the circulation of objects and ideas. She also has a larger interest in interactions engendered by mobility in the early modern world. Sandra obtained her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, and has held positions and fellowships at, among other places, Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the University of St Andrews, and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours.
Mail: stoffolo@fbk.eu
