Research Grant Holder, Venice Center
Year: 2021-23
Email: benedetta.cotta@unive.it
This position is issued in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Benedetta Cotta
Post-Doc Fellow, Venice Center
Supervisor: Cristina Baldacci
Year: 2020-21
Email: emiliano.guaraldo@unive.it
This post-doc is issued in collaboration with ECLT
Emiliano Guaraldo’s research focuses on the visual culture of the Anthropocene, with a particular interest in the relationship between contemporary art and the production of technical and scientific images. He obtained a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Before joining the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari, Emiliano worked at the University of St. Gallen as a research assistant and public lecturer in Italian literature and culture. His dissertation, Estrazione: the Anthropocene and the Emergence of Italian Petro-imagination, analysed the carbon fossil imaginary in 20th-century visual and literary culture, with an emphasis on corporate cinema, and the works of Pasolini and Antonioni. His current project, The Aesthetics of Extinction and Climate Change: Visualizations of the Anthropocene at the Venice Biennale, aims to catalogue and interpret artistic investigations of the Anthropocene since 2000.
Emiliano Guaraldo’s publications and cv
Post-Doc Fellow, Venice Center
Supervisor: Valentina Bonifacio
Year: 2020-21
Email: sasha.gora@unive.it
This post-doc is issued in collaboration with ECLT
L. Sasha Gora is a cultural historian and writer with a focus on food studies and contemporary art. She received a PhD (summa cum laude) from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center on the subject of Indigenous restaurants in Canada, and is currently working on her first book, titled Culinary Claims. Before joining the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari, she was a Lecturer at LMU’s Amerika-Institut. She spent spring 2019 as a visiting scholar in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her postdoctoral research in Venice looks at the history of culinary reactions to climate change in coastal regions, with an emphasis on restaurants as venues for cultural and environmental negotiation.
Post-Doc Fellow, Venice Center
Supervisor: Stefano Ercolino
Year: 2020-21
This post-doc is issued in collaboration with ECLT
Daniel Finch-Race researches creative representations of environmental change in French and Italian culture since the mid-1800s. His doctoral work at the University of Cambridge focussed on ecocritical approaches to Charles Baudelaire’s urban poetry of 1857-61. Before joining the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari, he held teaching fellowships at the University of Southampton and Durham University, an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, and a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Bristol. His current project blends the environmental and medical humanities to address physical and emotional aspects of pollution in France and Italy around the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Daniel Finch-Race’s publications and cv
Post-Doc Fellow, Venice Center
Supervisor: Francesco Vallerani
2020-21
Email: ifor.duncan@unive.it
This post-doc is issued in collaboration with ECLT
Ifor Duncan is a writer and inter-disciplinary researcher whose research concerns the relationships between political violence and watery spaces and materialities. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA), Goldsmiths, University of London, where he developed the concept of necro-hydrology, which addresses the ways hydrologic properties are instrumentalised through border regimes, as technologies of obfuscation, and weaponised against marginalised communities. His current research project, Submergences, proposes to explore the ways hydrologic knowledges and practices can be mobilised to imagine alternate strategies of resistance against such forms of environmental weaponisation. Before joining the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari, Ifor taught at the CRA and on the Media Studies programme in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.
Post-Doc Fellow, Venice Center
Year: 2020-21
Email: heather.contant@unive.it
This post-doc is issued in collaboration with ECLT
Heather Contant explores the collectivist tendencies of media arts through her research, teaching, and creative endeavors. Her research on the history of wireless media has gained recognition in multiple publications, such as Leonardo Music Journal, Soundscape, and Journal of Sonic Studies, and she was awarded the 2018 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Higher Degree Research for her PhD thesis from the University of New South Wales Art and Design in Sydney, Australia. Her current work investigates what she calls the generative collectivism of long-term environmentally sustainable media arts projects that take place in extreme environments. She seeks to understand how such projects facilitate the development of new theories, practices, and technologies of sustainable media that make it easier for other collectives to form and explore the possibilities of sustainable media in their own environmental circumstances as well.
Research Fellow, Venice Center
Project: The Nature of Money and its Social Perception in Times of Crisis – Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, tutor: prof. Francesca Coin)
2018-2021
Email: luigi.doria@unive.it
Luigi Doria is a fixed-term researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari, where he investigates the nature of money and its social perception in times of crisis from the perspective of economic sociology. He graduated in Economics (Economia Politica) from Bocconi University, Milan. He earned his Ph.D. in Regional Planning and Public Policy (Pianificazione Territoriale e Politiche Pubbliche del Territorio) from the University IUAV of Venice. Some of his past activities: he carried out research at the University IUAV of Venice and at Bocconi University, Milan; he was fixed-term researcher of CNRS at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CNRS-EHESS-ENS), Paris; he carried out teaching activies (as a docente a contratto) at Bocconi University and at the University of Calabria; he taught a course, as a visiting faculty member, at the International University College of Turin. He was a fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study.
Post-Doc Fellow, Venice Center
Project: “Afrodescendants” in Post- World War II Italy: Experiences and Representations (1944-1979) (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici – Department of Humanities, tutor: prof. Ricciarda Ricorda)
2017-2019
Igiaba Scego is a writer and a post-Doc researcher of the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. During her first year in Venice she focused on Italian colonialism and blackness in Italy. Scego examined colonialism and masculinity in the light of how culture functions, and what it means. Together with the other Fellows, she is also involved in the Center’s overarching theme of cultural pluralism.
She took part in several events organized by Ca’ Foscari University, such as the literary festival Incroci di Civiltà, where she interviewed the great African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In april 2018 she was actively involved in the Afropean Bridges symposium, the first in a series of international workshops that are going to take place in Venice on Africa-EU relationships and on African-European identity, within the framework of the UN International Decade for People of African Descent.
In her capacity as a writer, in 20017-2018 Scego wrote two short stories based on her research (one of them is about to be published in Italy, the other in Germany), and edited an anthology for children about refugees (Italian publication due in November 2018).
Ph.D. Student, Venice Center
Project: Tra profitto ed Industria: traduzioni di termini economici e percorsi di ricezione sociale del De Regimine Principum di Egidio Romano nel medioevo (XIII-XV secolo), (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici – Department of Humanities, tutor: Antonio Montefusco)
2017-2020
Email: laura.calvaresi@unive.it
Laura Calvaresi is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Departement of Humanities, tutor: Antonio Montefusco) and a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari. Her reaserch project–Building a language, rethinking an ethic: virtues of the Christian Merchant between liberalitas and industria (1250-1350)–is at the crossroads between Italian Literature and Medieval History, dealing with Political Economy in Medieval Literature. Laura’s focus is on the relevant expressions and linguistic syntagmata (compositions) in both Latin and vernacular European languages which represent the merchants’ world of values between 1250 and 1350. Her research also participates in a broader project called Political Economy of Medieval Literature. The formation of economic categories in Medieval European Literature (XII- XV centuries). Her training started at the University of Macerata where she studied Medieval History.
Fixed-term Researcher, Venice Center
Project: Language Rhetoric and Linguistic Strategies of Religious Intolerant Discourses: The Case of South Asia
2017-2020
Email: andrea.drocco@unive.it
Andrea Drocco is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he is teaching Indo-Aryan linguistics and Hindi. After his Ph.D. in Indological Studies (University of Turin, 2005), he taught Indo-Aryan linguistics at the University of Turin. His main area of research is the development of the alignment system of New Indo-aryan languages, in particular in the period preceding the 19th century. He has published research papers not only on the morphosyntactic alignment of Braj, Hindi and Bangani but languages also on the interpretation of the technical terms tatsama, tadbhava and deśī in the context of the medieval Indian grammatical tradition. Andrea is currently a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and he is carrying out a research on the linguistic and rhetorical strategies of intolerant discourses in South Asia.
