Research areas

Curriculum

After a training in classics at the University of Florence, I earned my PhD at the University of Milan. Before joining the Centre for Medieval Literature in 2015 and later the Danish Institute for Advanced Study in 2018, I held a series of international fellowships at the Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes in Paris (2005), at the University of Milan (2007-2011), at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (2010-2011), at Durham University (Newton International Fellow 2011-2012) and at the University of Geneva (2013-2014). I have been visiting scholar at the University of Uppsala and in 2015 I have been awarded a Summer Fellowship at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies in Princeton. My research has been supported through grants awarded by a wide range of funding bodies (Swiss National Fund, Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, Société Académique de Genève; Leverhulme Trust, British Academy; Italian Ministry of Education and University; Indipendent Research Fund Denmark, Carlsberg Foundation, Joint Committe for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social; European Commission). 

Research information

I am a Byzantinist with a focus on the history of the ideas in Middle Byzantine period (843-1204). I have a strong interest in theories of authorship and I have investigated authorial identity in Byzantium against the background of modern-day theoretical debates, calling attention on the existence of self-commentaries in 12th century Byzantium. Within this framework I investigate strategies to ensure and preserve intellectual property in pre-modern textual cultures. I also work on the history of the emotions in Byzantium. I am currently co-leader with Christian Høgel of the CML research strand "Imperial Languages". I am PI in two major projects. The first one is a MSCA Doctoral Network called "From Antiquity to Community: Rethinking Classical Heritage through Citizen Humanities", which includes 4 universities and will train 10 PhD students in the area of manuscript and immaterial heritage. The second is a Carlsberg Semper Ardens Accelerate project called "A rhetoric for the empire: education, politics and speech-making in the Byzantine Millennium", which will investigate middle-Byzantine exegeses on the corpus Hermogenianum. I have previously led the project “Medieval Self-Commentaries Beyond Europe: A Transcultural Perspective”, thanks to which I have discovered autograph notes of the 12th-century intellectual John Tzetzes in the Leiden ms. Voss. Gr. Q1.