Marco

The research project focuses on the history and future of text and textuality, drawing on scholarship in book history, media and communication studies, and digital history. It takes advantage of the extensive research that has converged at MoHu in recent years to design and implement a teaching program with the Tokyo College on the history and future of the text.

In the summer of 2024, Paola Molino and Federico Mazzini spent two weeks and one month, respectively, at the University of Tokyo, collaborating with Professors Michael Facius and Cintia Vezzani to co-teach the BA course “The Future of the Text.” The central inquiry addressed in this course sought to ascertain whether the “written word,” a concept with a centuries-long history, retains a future within the digital landscape. Contemporary trends, such as the replacement of novels by movies and subsequently video games as the predominant cultural form, the transition from text to audio and video in messenger apps and social media platforms, a concomitant loss of concentration and focus, and declining rates of functional literacy in many developed countries, appear to suggest a negative answer to this question. This is further compounded by the fact that, just a year after the emergence of major language models like ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has already begun to perform a significant amount of reading and writing on our behalf. In this interdisciplinary course, we approached these trends not as absolute truths, but as a point of departure to explore the intricate relationship between literacy, media, and society through a comparative lens. We examined long-term trends in diverse textual media, the evolution of technologies from the printing press to social media platforms, and the social contexts of reading and literacy. This enabled us to contemplate past, present, and future trajectories of textuality.

The subsequent phase of the project entails the execution of the Summer School “The Future of the Text” (June 16-20, 2025), which will be hosted at the Center for Advanced Studies in Mobility and Humanities in Padua and is supported by the Universities of Padua and Tokyo. The Summer School aspires to delve into the historical progression of textual practices and technologies, providing insights and stimulating debates on the present and future of texts. The program will feature a series of traditional lectures on the history of the book, digital history, the mobility of texts and maps, and the challenges of writing English texts in the era of AI. These lectures will be complemented by hands-on workshops in libraries, museums, and exhibitions in Padua and Venice. The Summer School will be offered to international postgraduate students from Padua and Tokyo. It will be a collaborative effort, with instruction provided by Paola Molino, Federico Mazzini, and two colleagues from the University of Tokyo, Michael Facius and Naoko Shimazu. Further details regarding the Summer School, including the call for applications, will be made available on this website by mid-February 2025.

Postdoctoral researcher: Claudia Addabbo

This two years research project explores natural history collections and their mobility as interdisciplinary objects, between history, botany and art. The aim is to focus on the figure of the Italian botanist and art collector Achille Forti (1878-1937) and on his considerable Algae Herbarium, today preserved at the Botanical Museum of the University of Padua. It includes around 40,000 specimens of algae from all-over the world, collected by different people and in different scientific expeditions between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
The main objective of the project is to reconstruct the history of the formation of Forti’s Herbarium and to consider its “mobility” in space and time, thanks to an integrated and extensive study of archival material, museological collections and primary literature, in the light of history of science and mobility studies.

Delving into the area of interest emerging from the overlapping fields of tourism and mobility studies, the DeterTour research project proposes an interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary urban policies, materialities and narratives of deterrence implemented to bound unwanted tourist mobilities.
Drawing on the legacies of the pandemic, the interpretive lenses of cultural geography and urban studies combine to analyse recent and upcoming laws and regulations aiming to contain tourist mobilities. As a result, the analysis identifies reworked versions of key concepts regulating the limitations on personal mobility during the pandemic, namely footfall and border, as co-constitutive elements of contemporary strategies of deterrence. Significantly, they operate at different scales while disseminating narratives concerning the restrained access to heavily touristed areas, specifically urban destinations.
Emphasising the potentialities of an approach merging mobility and the humanities, DeterTour will employ methodologies that combine critical discourse analysis with im/mobile phenomenological, non-representational explorations of urban spaces to gather and analyse perceptions and experiences of contained tourist mobilities participating in the co-production processes of heavily touristed Southern European urban spaces.

Research group:
Peter Adey, Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory and Urban Design at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark
Kaya Barry, Senior Lecturer of Cultural Geography at Griffith University, Australia
Antonio Paolo Russo, Professor of Tourism and Geography at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

Main partners:
OMERO – CENTRO DI RICERCA IN STUDI URBANI, based at the UNIVERSITY OF TURIN and chaired by Alberto Vanolo
FRINGE URBAN NARRATIVES, based at the UNIVERSIDAD DE ALCALÁ, SPAIN and chaired professor Patricia García

Call for Papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2026

Session Title: Filtering Mobilities: Material, Digital, and Narrative Infrastructures of Inequality in Contemporary Tourism
Convenors: Giuseppe Tomasella & Tania Rossetto

We invite paper proposals for a critical exploration of how contemporary tourism mobilities are systematically filtered, producing new geographies of inequality. This panel examines the hybrid infrastructures – material, digital, and narrative – that choreograph access to place, from smart reservations and physical barriers to moralising discourses of sustainability. Employing a mobility humanities lens, we seek contributions that investigate how these intersecting systems allocate privilege and disadvantage, reshaping embodied experiences, affective atmospheres, and sociality for visitors and residents alike. We are particularly interested in work that analyses the production of classed, racialised, and ableist exclusions, as well as narratives that contest or reimagine these regimes. The session aims to collectively re-politicise leisure mobility and envision more just geographies of movement.

Please send your title, a 200-word abstract, name, and affiliation to giuseppe.tomasella@unipd.it by 15 February 2026.