Postdoctoral project

Sara Abram

God’s oneness and the imminence of the “Day of Reckoning” are the most dominant subjects of the first revelations that Muḥammad, the prophet of Islām, announces to the tribes of Mecca (7^th cent.). The ultimate destiny of humanity as described by the Quran and the Sunna poses today, as well as in ancient times, questions that are by no means negligible. The project aims to frame how the vivid representations of the Universal Judgement, the pleasures of Paradise, and the torments of Hell have been assimilated and interpreted by the different intellectual currents of Islamic thought (traditionalist, theological-speculative and mystical-esoteric) to better place the perspective I intend to shed light on: the philosophical one. The interpretations of the so-called falāsifa, compared to the literal readings of the Quran and to the many Islamic “narrations” on the topic, turn out to be among the highest expressions of intellectual autonomy that the history of Islamic thought has ever known. The preliminary study of falāsifa’s conception of the soul and the hereafter – together with the identification of the ancient and late antique Greek sources that they used – will led to a better contextualization of the two case studies that I intend to analyze: the hitherto unedited Book on the Knowledge of the Hereafter by the mathematician and philosopher Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfizārī (10^th-11^th cent.) and the Treatise on the Philosophical Description of the Hereafter by the Persian physician and philosopher Abū l-Faraǧ ʿAlī ibn Hindū (d. 1029/1032).

Stefano Poggi

Between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, a new conception of foreignness took root in Europe. Whereas before each individual coming from a different community was considered as a foreigner, with the rise of the administrative state foreignness became strictly related to belonging to a certain national community – and ultimately to citizenship.

This project aims to investigate this change by considering how Lombard-Venetian authorities regulated the foreigners’ mobility from the end of the Republic of Venice to the 1848 uprising. In order to do so, it will consider not only the conceptions and the legislation of the central élites but also local bureaucrats’ control practices of foreigner’s mobility.

Beatrice Zucca Micheletto

WELMIG investigates the relationship between mobility and the welfare system in early modern and modern pre-unitarian Italy, spanning from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. WELMIG focuses on a range of welfare institutions (charity institutions, hospitals, workhouses, welfare agencies) and exploits their historical archives across the Italian peninsula. It will collect information on the socio-economic profile of individuals and families who received assistance and/or were committed in the ordinary activities of the welfare institutions. It will adopt an intersectional approach, paying attention to gender, age, class, religion and ethnicity of recipients and of the people who revolved around these institutions. At the same time it will analyze how the hosting societies of the past organised and managed the access to local resources for newcomers and migrants, the implementation of norms and laws and the coherence (or not) between norms and practices.

WELMIG links the history of the welfare institutions to the mobility turn in social science and dialogues with a range of historiographical approaches – gender history, social history, labour history, family history. It will promote debate and exchange of ideas on the topic for academic and non-academic public with the support of the MobiLab, and with the collaboration of the University of Cambridge (Campop) and the international network WeMove (CA19112).

Laura Lo Presti

HuMaps explores the link between the emerging “cartographic humanities” and mobility and migration studies from a geo-visual and narratological perspective. The two-year research project has the dual objective of analytically deconstructing the imaginaries of migratory maps as well as reconstructing alternative, creative and sensitive imaginations of human mobility. These two research lines thus envisage an analysis of the cartographic narratives of the global migrant crisis to assess how maps, map-like objects and cartographic imaginaries have reproduced human migration over time – and migrated through several networks, artistic media and hybrid materials – to alternately foster feelings of hospitality and hostility towards newcomers. More importantly, HuMaps will reflect on novel applications of digital (and non-digital) mapping methodologies in the context of migration storytelling. These methodologies will be developed in collaboration with the MobiLab, as well as with the support of international scholars and partner institutions in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Gábor Gángó

The “Maecenas Germaniae,” the Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622-1672) was a book collector, patron of the arts, Lord Marshal at the court of the Mainz Elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn, and not least friend and supporter of the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Boineburg’s private library as an encyclopaedic, with an abundant number of hand-written cross-references interconnected “database” and his extended scholarly correspondence provides the source basis for the mapping of the international network of politically, denominationally, and scholarly engaged intellectuals after the Peace of Westphalia.

Gábor Gángó’s project aims at the reconstruction of Boineburg’s role in the knowledge transfer between Germany and Italy. This research would encompass details of the acquisition, circulation, and reviewing of Italian books within his network as well as the determination of the place which science and theology that were produced in Italy occupied in Boineburg’s ever-broadening system of knowledge.

Besides, the project will focus on the issue of confessionality in Boineburg, which crystallised in a special way in his conversion. Boineburg, who received a Lutheran education in Jena and Helmstedt, was converted at the Imperial Diet of Regensburg in 1653. In the literature, his better career prospects at the court of the Mainz Elector are given as possible reasons. Here Gábor Gángó wants to overcome the previous state of research and also reveal the intellectual motives for the conversion. To this end, he will also examine the collective thought processes in Boineburg’s correspondence with other scholars. This collective communication and thought process has a lot to do with Italy and cannot be understood without the Italian context. As it will be shown on the collected source materials, impulses of the Counter-Reformation in the 17^th century in general and also particularly in Boineburg’s case came from Rome.

As a result, one would be in a better position to understand, through the case study of an important German Catholic convert, the mid-17^th-century reconciliation attempts between the authority of the Catholic Church and the aspirations of modern science and philosophy for the possession of true knowledge.

Teresa Bernardi

The research project explores the role played by social ties within processes of migrant identification during the early modern period. The historical and geographical background of this study are the cosmopolitan city of Venice and its domains during the seventeenth century. The research is primarily based on a specific archival source: the so called processetti matrimoniali. This documentation consists in pre-matrimonial enquiries aimed at attesting the marital status, or widowhood, of foreigners and other ‘mobile people’ who wanted to get married in Venice. The project’s hypothesis is that relying on gender as a lens of analysis, along with focusing deeply on women’s mobility, may challenge some historiographical assumptions about the very phenomena of mobility and identification: respectively, the presumed clear-cut between short and long-distance mobility; and the assumed replacement of orality – in terms of reputation and social networks –  by written documents.

This research is part of a bigger international programme funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and supervised by Prof. Jean-François Chauvard. The research group’s overall objective is to explore the relation between marriage and human mobility both from a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. It does so by comparing the city of Venice, the Greek World under the Venetian dominion and other cities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, this programme will pursue the digitalization of a vast portion of the processetti in the context of the virtual research environment Geovistory (http://geovistory.com/). In addition to the digital humanities, this project’s research interests thus span various fields of social, legal, and cultural history.

Benoît Maréchaux

The project explores the emergence of forced convict mobility in the early modern Mediterranean. It analyzes the flows of prisoners that Genoese galley contractors working for the Spanish empire brought from different areas (such as Lombardy, Catalonia, Lucca, Naples, or Lunigiana) by collaborating with a multiplicity of stakeholders (kingdoms, cities, bishops, feudal lords, the Inquisition, military tribunals, etc.). While the literature on the history of penal transportation has often analyzed the problem from a nation-state point of view and, more specifically, as a colonial phenomenon, this research explores how a constellation of non-state actors and polities organized the transnational flows of convicts in the Mediterranean through different types of agreements, contracts and markets. By developing a new database on prisoners transported to the Genoese galleys, it also aims to reveal the social and demographic impact of forced labor mobility.  By so doing, the project discusses how forced mobility shaped Spanish polycentric empire-building, the business interests of Italian merchant-bankers and shipowners, and dramatic changes in the lives of people forced to move and to commodify their labor power as oarsmen.

Laura Lo Presti

Addressing the contemporary European migration crisis from the vantage point of its maps, this research project explores the mediated landscape of institutional, mass-media, artistic, and mobile mappings that concern migration and cultural diversity issues. Drawing from fields of mobility studies, visual culture studies, and post-representational map studies, this interdisciplinary work reflects on the cultural and affective ecologies and the technological and political digitalities through which cartographic images represent and perform the condition of im/mobility experienced by migrant subjects. Adopting digital ethnography and visual analysis of cartographic media content, the project pays particular attention to the many unpredictable ways in which maps, as visual landscapes of human mobilities, elicit and embody a plethora of discourses, actions, and feelings about the migration crisis, its forms of hierarchized mobilities, and alternative imaginings of solidarity and hospitality.

Silvia Bruzzi

The research project aims to examine human mobility phenomena that have crossed the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, from the late 19^th century to World War II, focusing on the histories and experiences of Eritrean and Libyan women. Adopting a gender perspective and crossing visual sources (postcards, family photographs, newsreels, ethnographic documentaries) and written sources (legal literature and judicial archives in Arabic and Italian), the research will show that female actors are essential to understand the circulation of ideas, images and subjects across Italy, Eritrea and Libya. The scopes of the research are twofold. On the one hand, the analysis will highlight the impact of mobility phenomena (of ideas, images and people) on the social and legal status of Eritrean and Libyan women in the colonial context. On the other hand, it will trace and reconstruct the transnational trajectories of “exceptional normal” women who have crossed this space, subverting or inhabiting the social and legal norms.

Ottavia Mazzon

The project «LiVE» studies the paradigms of mobility through two different but closely connected perspectives: mobility of physical objects (namely books) and mobility of texts. The aim is to map the impact that the Library of St Mark’s collection of Greek codices had on other European book collections in the 16th century, a crucial time for the affirmation of ancient Greek as part of the European élites’ cultural heritage and the formation of many Renaissance collections of Greek books. «LiVE» will provide the first critical edition and English translation of the earliest loan registers of the Library of St Mark, recording the book loans that took place between 1545 to 1559. Starting from the identification of the manuscripts that were effectively borrowed, the research will focus on tracing the copies that were produced, following the library loans with the objective of reconstructing their history, from the circumstances of their production to their present conservation site.