PhD project

Jinxiao Wang

Despite his profession as a military doctor for the Italian Navy, Ludovico Nicola di Giura (1868-1947) was known to the world as sinologist, translator, writer and traveller. This four-year research takes a global microhistory perspective to compile a biography for the figure based on his published works, manuscripts, private collection and first-hand archival sources from Italy and China. Featured with L. N. di Giura’s geographical mobility, social integration, and contribution to Sino-Italian cultural exchange, this research advances on three dimensions: 1) L. N. di Giura’s life-in-mobile, namely Medical education and travelling with the Italian Navy (1868-1900), Life in China (1900-1931) and Prefect and Mayor of Chiaromonte (1931-1947); 2) his integration into the contemporary Chinese upper class, including the various forces that guided the fate of the country and the local intellectuals; 3) his re-discovery of Chinese civilization despite being an initially ambitious “Civilizing missionary”, as well as his efforts on introducing Chinese culture and community to the Italian public with his commentaries, translation and literary creation. The study will not only bring to light a figure buried in history, but will offer a microscopic view into the history about Italy and China at the turn of the 20th century, which indeed represents a starting point for the discovery of absolute novelties in this context.

Urban wildness is a little explored topic because of its very nature. One reason for this neglect is to be found in urban wildness both as a dynamic concept as well as an ever-changing entity. How to study a mobile and innately undefined object? Rather than considering it merely as a forgotten space or a natural resource, this project aims to interact with urban wildness as a subject. To foster a relational approach, the project explores urban wildness going through it and involving all senses in the production of knowledge.

A preliminary part of the research will focus on the evaluation of methods and instruments of enquiry, their capabilities and limits of observing and recording this mobile subject: from fieldwork diary to photography, from audio-visual methods to performance.

Going deeper, the project will attempt to build a relationship with urban wildness inhabitants, such as plants, animals and people. It is in fact their entanglement that makes urban wildness a living, dynamic, mobile subject. Collaborative labs will be opened on the field to enquiry and enhance a collective representation of urban wildness ‘from inside it’. Finally, the project will pay special attention in the making of synesthetic artefacts, out of the multiple wildness representations archived, to disseminate this new knowledge.

The research will be developed by specific case studies, in different European cities, following the footprint of the stereotypical “nomads” that are believed to be the main inhabitants of urban wildness: the Roma. Are Roma the only living in urban wildness? Who is living on the move in contemporary cities? Is mobility a choice?

The interaction with urban wildness, in different contexts, will open new possibilities of conceiving and representing the geographies of mobility in the contemporary city, raising the issue that to live on the move mainly means a restriction on the very possibilities of movement in contemporary Europe.

Andrea Frizzera

At the beginning of an age in which Rome developed an ever-growing awareness of its Mediterranean extension, we can observe the exploitation of new possibilities of movement that the new political configuration of the Mediterranean could offer. Not only does this spatial turn involve commerce, cultural exchanges and migration, to name a few, but political refugees as well. This project aims to conduct an investigation into the latter. So, my first step will be to start from existing prosopographic studies, ancient sources (such as literary, epigraphic, numismatic) and more recent ones on Sullan proscribed will do that not only to share their journeys and explore the ways in which they found rescue in different places in the Mediterranean Sea, but to shed light too on their choices of movement, and on their fresh identities in their newly-adopted homes. A study on the mobility of the fugitive proscribed could not just give us an insight into what extent the elites were aware of Rome’s full Mediterranean influence, but also, by comparing all accounts, provide information on how the different political and social situations exercised influence on decision-making both by the Sullan faction and the proscribed themselves. The mobility of the proscribed resulted very much affected by all these factors and it had peculiar features compared to other displacement typologies. I am also hopeful that such an area of research could contribute, from a different perspective, to enrich the debate on the significance of the Sullan proscriptions and the consequences they caused in the Roman world. Finally, I would hesitate to exclude the possibility that, by adopting such an approach, the research’s focus could expand to 43 BC proscriptions or other cases of political refugees or exiles in the first century BC.

Yafa El Masri

A growing number of academics across the globe now share the conviction that the mainstream notion of development needs to be deconstructed to open a way for cultural alternatives that nurture and respect different forms of life on Earth (Kothari et al, 2019). The concept of post-development, which is squarely rooted in solidarity, has appeared as a way to defend the local against the global, giving value to community economics, human wellbeing and local traditions (Mathews, 2017). And while refugees have long been silenced by the humanitarian government and widely portrayed solely as recepients of humanitarian aid (Agier, 2011: Rajaram, 2002: Silvermann, 2008), this study rather explores innovative post development approaches to managing space and livelihood practiced by refugees, and even identifies the expansion of solidarity-based initiatives to the refugee hosting communities. This study attempts to demonstrate how refugees are agents of their own space and post development through a strong base of solidarity, rootedness and collective emplacement. This study takes Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as case of observation, utilizes postcolonial methods and Donna Haraway’s feminist concept of situated knowledge, to reflect on my own positioned rationality of growing up as a stateless Palestinian refugee in Lebanon’s refugee camps. Using long term participation observation, auto-ethnography and interviews in Lebanon and Europe’s Palestinian refugee community, the study finds that solidarity-based dynamics (cooperation values, food sharing and gift economies) tend to be increasingly replacing the shrinking humanitarian development aid and market activities within Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Then, if “grassroots solidarity can transform the world” and if “Another world is possible”, and possibly another world is even necessary, along these lines, can refugees help change the world?

Keywords: Refugees, Livelihood, Post-Development, Pluriverse, Refugee Agency

Michele Visentin

Between the 16th and the 17th centuries, the University of Padova and some cultural circles of the city represented a major centre of dissemination of Libertinism ideas throughout Europe. This movement, even if very heterogeneous, is characterized by some common denominators, e.g. the impossibility to base ethics on religious dogmas, and the interest for direct observation of nature – including the human body.

How far did this cultural climate encourage a relative tolerance (or at least a moral indifference) for homosexuality?  And if so, did this relative tolerance influence the mobility toward Padua of Italian and European students, professors, intellectuals?

The hardest problem of this research is to identify the sources and to analyse them from an unusual perspective. For centuries the expressions of homosexuality have been simply effaced, except for the criminal law. Hence, the necessity to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to find the “echo” of dissident sexualities in different kind of texts and environments.

Alessandro Favatà

The research project investigates the trans-national networks existing between the Italian peninsula and the New World during the 17th century. The analysis of the diffusion and success of specific consumer goods appears to be one of the most appropriate and comprehensive methods for studying these phenomena. Combining a micro and macro-historical approach, the research will focus on the different moments of the sugar commodity chain, from its production to its consumption. A great importance will also be given to the flow of men, credit and information that accompanied and sustained the life of the crop. By analysing travel reports, correspondences, customs registers, culinary and medical recipes, account ledgers of merchants and Libri di commercio e di famiglia  [provide translation, e.g. Trade and family books], the project will investigate how the Italian peninsula and its inhabitants came in touch with this product and the evolving social impact that sugar had on consumption practices.