MoHu Projects

SAIL analyses early migration from Sicily to Louisiana between 1865 and 1901. It sheds light on agents of migration who enrolled peasants in Sicily and on their transnational connections with labour recruiters based in Louisiana, who were looking for a labour force after the abolition of slavery at the end of the US Civil War in 1865. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Italian government considered emigration as an issue to be managed or opposed: the 1901 law restricted the activity of agents of migration, who were regarded as people smugglers and used as a scapegoat to justify migration, rather than being studied as one of the interrelated factors triggering it. This simplistic view permeated the public debate in Italy, has not been challenged by scholarship on Sicilian migration, and resonates with current populist and xenophobic narratives.

SAIL offers the first comprehensive study of early Sicilian migration to Louisiana by adopting an interdisciplinary approach combining social, economic, and cultural history with literature. Thanks to a thorough investigation and cross-referencing of untapped Italian and US archival sources and literary works, SAIL maps the presence of agents of migration in Sicily, analysing their identity, background, methods, organisation, and the transnational connections with labour recruiters in Louisiana, gauging their effectiveness in disseminating a dreaming image of the USA among Sicilian peasants and examining the extent to which their activity impacted the migration flow alongside other factors (economic depression, political turmoil, chain migration, remittances).

SAIL will fill a scholarly gap, develop tools for researching migrations, and reflect on Sicily’s past and its present as one of the main gateways into Europe. Through activities involving academic and non-academic audiences, SAIL will stimulate a debate and raise awareness around one of Europe’s most pressing concerns: safeguarding the right to safe migration.

Know more:

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101149130

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

The research project aims to improve our knowledge of gender dynamics within the workplace in the pre-industrial age, focusing on the Italian peninsula between the 15th and 19th century. The objective is to quantify in which activities and in what percentage women and men were engaged and to reconceptualize of some of the main categories in historical analysis and in the current debate, such as productive/unproductive, paid/unpaid, public/private, and domestic/care/non-domestic work. Therefore, the project includes every form of work, be it rewarded with money, non-monetary means, or carried out in compliance with family duties and forms of reciprocity between family members, parents, neighbours.

While previous studies have focused mainly on urban areas, this project will also examine the rural context, which it will attempt to quantify through a geo-referenced analysis, owing to the wealth of information available for Italy. Attention will also be paid to short and long-distant mobility.

New research will be carried out in the Italian archives, making innovative use of the abundance of information especially in criminal sources. The results will then be compared in a European perspective through a final conference. The project will create a qualitative and a quantitative database using a novel methodology that links the language used, space utilisation, and forms of mobility to accomplish its goals. It will also enable us to broaden the knowledge of the dynamics affecting the world of work in the pre-industrial age by linking gender, work, workplaces and mobility in a comparative and quantitative way for the first time.

A long term perspective will offer insight on dynamics that are very important for the current debate, which the outbreak of the pandemic has exacerbated. These include gender discrimination in the workplace, the work done in the domestic sphere, gender roles, and women’s contribution to national income.

In today’s world, the concept of borders extends beyond geographical lines etched on maps. Borders are dynamic and constantly evolving. They shape, and are shaped by, the flows of migration, the rise of nationalism, and the stories of people, ideas and objects moving across them. As Etienne Balibar (2002: 84) reminds us, “Borders are no longer the shores of politics, or the edges of power; they have become the space of the political itself.”

In a world grappling with migration crises, reactionary nationalism, and the never-ending building of walls, MOBILITY ON THE EDGE offers a multidisciplinary approach across geography, history, and anthropology to reflect on the profound impact borders have on human mobility and the environment we inhabit, asking how we can create a more sensitive cartography of these edges.

By exploring “zones of transition” where borders do not neatly divide but overlap and entangle (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), the project is thus interested in mapping spaces of friction and negotiation, where movement and containment are constantly renegotiated. “Borderworlds”—a term coined by Gloria Anzaldúa to capture the hybrid spaces at the margins are also “borders-as-skins” — a term used by Franck Billé (2017) to highlight the perceptual, bodily, aptic and sensous processes that challenge walling and de-walling practices.

Borders, in this sense, are seen by participants of this project as dynamic processes that affect human and nonhuman actors alike—maps and technologies, but also bodies, animals, and plants, all of which co-create these boundaries.

The project is also anchored in geo-philosophies of movement and processuality (Merriman, 2019), drawing attention to the ways in which human and nonhuman mobilities both transgress and reproduce borders and aims to engage with critical cartography to unpack the inherent instability of territorial borders and the ways they are continuously re-inscribed.

In this sense, one of the project’s highlights is its innovative approach to critical and cultural cartography. Students of the MA in Mobility Studies will be actively involved in the project by creating an “Alter-Atlas of Borders” — a cartographic project that rethinks borders (and mapping) using graphic, tactile, cinematic and sound-based approaches.

Some of the questions we will afford are:

• In what ways do borders materialise through everyday practices and state policies, and how do they shift in response to geopolitical changes, migration flows, or environmental factors?

• How do the movement of human and nonhuman actors, as well as data and ideas, complicate and transgress borders?

• What kinds of experiences emerge in liminal spaces, or “borderworlds”, where traditional divisions between inside and outside, citizen and foreigner, are blurred?

• How can critical cartography challenge dominant representations of borders as fixed lines on maps and propose alternative ways of understanding borders, migration stories, and mobility patterns?

We will try to tackle these questions through the following activities:

• Organising a series of seminars held at the MoHu Centre, inviting international experts on borders, critical cartorgaphy, mobility, and migration.

• Conducting an overseas mission at the Department of Geography and the Centre for Silk Road at Berkeley University to open scientific discussions on the project theme and explore potential future collaborations.

• Collaborating on creative outputs, engaging students in producing a critical and artistic exploration of borders through mapping. This creative exploration will challenge traditional map-making and offer new perspectives on global migration issues.

By focusing on these activities, participants will be able to explore the multifaceted ways in which borders are enacted, negotiated, and contested through mobility, mapping, and interdisciplinary research.

External Collaborators:

• Frank Billé, Cultural Anthropologist, Assistant Professor, Berkeley University
• Peter Merriman, Geographer, Full Professor, Aberystwyth University
• Clancy Wilmott, Geographer and Media Scholar, Assistant Professor, Berkeley University

Contact & More Information
For further details on the Mobility on the Edge project, upcoming events, or collaboration opportunities, please contact Laura Lo Presti at  laura.lopresti@unipd.it.

Circu.I.T.I.N.G. – Circulation of Ideas and Things within Intellectual networks around the Globe aims to promote seminars, research activities, and dissemination practices focused on the circulation of ideas from a processual and historical perspective, with particular attention to the relationship between symbolic and material infrastructures and the role played by the formal and informal fields that codify the possibilities of ideational and scholarly exchange.

As suggested by our acronym, we aim at reconstructing the circuits through which ideas and things, and more generally cultural objects, are mobilized within globally-extended intellectual networks. If seen as scholarly fields, scientific and humanistic disciplines develop simultaneously a “national” dimension (as they emerge from connections and networks rooted in local traditions that have been organized, since the 19th century, in a close relationship to national institutional and governmental bodies) and a “transnational” dimension (as they are able to connect scholars from different geographic areas). What are the effects of the international extension—which does not mean, necessarily, a globalization—that affects the processes of creation, production, and circulation of ideas and other cultural objects? Can we describe and explain the relationships between the mobility of people (scholars and intellectuals, but also students and experts) and the mobility of ideas? More technically: what are the implications of the digital turn in terms of both the access to “dematerialized” sources and the growing availability of secondary literature—a process which raises questions of selection and capacity for critical comparison? And what is the relationship between the new ways of circulating ideas and the professional personas that intellectuals and intellectuals form of themselves as authors?

We will try to tackle these questions organizing two cycles of seminars and meeting, focused on two wide different but intertwined programs:

• The study of scientific and humanistic disciplines as historically-bounded spaces of expert knowledge production within which cultural objects—such as the products of social-historical research, which crystallize ideas, debates, and discoveries into different kinds of textual forms—are reflected upon, written down, circulated, and discussed. We understand the study of disciplines as focused on the infrastructures enabling scholarly and cultural exchanges: academic institutions; public and private research centers; publishing houses and their editors; networks of authors, readers, translators and critics; brokers who can circulate scholarly ideas to wider audiences, such as journalists, essayists, and science communicators;

• The relationship between material and digital cultural objects and the relevance of technologies in the practice of research, archiving, writing, and dialogue among scholars from different disciplines, with particular attention to the effects of the so-called “digital turn” on primary sources (e.g., with regard to their digitization and dematerialization) and secondary sources (e.g., with regard to the increasing availability of secondary literature, the ability to assess its quality and usefulness, and the selection options that arise in the face of its increase).

The two cycles will involve faculty members belonging to different institutions and disciplines, encouraging the participation of early career researchers, assignees and doctoral students, and complementing, where possible, the activities of the departmental Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (MOHU) and the Inter-University Center for Cultural History (CSC), with a view to consolidating existing relationships and creating future research collaborations and publication possibilities. In this regard, efforts will also be made to foster collaboration with the History of Sociology section (RC08) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), of which the PI of this project is vice president for the five-year period 2023-2027, by promoting joint initiatives on the historical study of disciplines and the relationship between digital sources and historical research.

Pierre Niccolò Sofia

The project aims to study the evolution of Venetian glass and silk manufacturing sectors between the 17th and 18th centuries through the lens of trade and its impacts. In recent decades, important research work has been conducted on the world of Venetian guilds, their evolution and adaptation to international competition between the 17th and 18th centuries. In doing this, the study of internal mechanisms and power relations, production and labor organization, and technological innovation has been rightly privileged within an intense historiographical debate. The study of the commercialization of the products of these manufacturing sectors, on the other hand, remains largely unexplored, as does that of the impact that the dynamics of international trade and the circulation of manufactured goods had on the productive world. In this regard, several works in recent decades have analyzed the role of external events (such as wars, epidemics etc.) on the performance of economic activities, studying their resilience and recover capacity. Through a comparative analysis conducted on both Venetian and European quantitative and qualitative sources, the project aims to explore the resilience of the Venetian glass and silk sectors in the face of frequent disruptions in international trade or sudden changes in demand. By doing so, it will be possible to better trace the network of diffusion of the products of Venetian manufactures to international markets, understand the characteristics of these trades and their variation over time, and reconstruct the impact that global circulations had on the productive sectors of the Early modern period.

The importance of things, the vitality and mobility of objects, and their ability to offer different viewpoints on life in the past are all themes that have emerged from the many recent historical studies on material culture. This project aims to link materiality to political history, taking 19th-century Italy and its transnational networks as our field of inquiry. The focus of our analysis will be the complex and changeable lives of several objects that took on political significance in various ways and on diverse occasions, thereby contributing to the construction of political and national identities. In 19th-century Europe not only personal accessories, everyday, decorative objects and artworks, but also natural specimens played a significant role in new forms of political mobilization and dissent and in the articulation of political discourse in new repertoires and narrative forms. Whereas studies on the social life of objects and their contribution to the construction of social and gender identities have already found numerous and articulated developments, much less has been done on the materiality of the political experience and its specificities. Our research project intends to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between politics and the world of objects in the belief that this will shed light on new aspects of individual and collective political experience, at a time, in the 19th century, when the modern political sphere was being built.

The project will reconstruct and give meaning to the political lives of many objects, focusing on two different perspectives (and their ongoing relationships):

– Objects in action, variously linked to activism, political dissent, and mobility during the Risorgimento.

– Objects and the politicization of nature, particularly botanical objects created and collected by intellectuals and /or patriots.

Far from adopting a static point of view, our research will highlight mobility, re-use, cultural translations, and the transnational circulation of political objects in their different dimensions. These things embodied new practices and crisscrossed private and public spaces, political upheavals, and commercial trade routes.

Thus, this project will, on the one hand, bring out novel aspects in Italian 19th-century political practices and nationalization channels, and, on the other, make new and innovative educational and dissemination tools available to a wider public. Bringing together the work of scholars who in three Italian universities have been working on political objects for some time, the project intends to build an innovative collective workshop on the material history of politics, reflect on the methodological aspects of approaching politics through objects and finally develop an intense dissemination and public history project.

The project features two other units, one coordinated by Arianna Arisi Rota at the University of Pavia, and one coordinated by Roberto Balzani at the University of Bologna.

The objective of the Padua unit is to analyze how the staging of the nation, especially during the revolutionary episodes of the Risorgimento, also took the form of the use of a significant armoury of objects which frequently belonged to the dimension of everyday life but were re-semanticized in political and patriotic terms.

The main objective of the  WALC project is the analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective (critical-literary, geographical, sociological) of walking in urban spaces as an intangible cultural heritage of contemporary urban mobility in European cities. The social and humanistic perspective proposed by this project suggests the importance of walking as a cultural practice. The post-pandemic time, the current social changes and climatic crisis ask to rethink cities and urban mobilities, especially the transport means and ways by which we move in space, and suggest re-evaluating the role of urban walking practices.

In European cities, walking in urban space is an often neglected but widely accessible everyday activity: allowing one to reflect on the conformation of the city, perceive and embody the map of the city, and identify new routes for experiencing and exploring everyday environments. Far from being a mere self-reflecting, individual practice, walking represents a common tool for empowering citizens, allowing them to understand the value of urban narratives traced by walking paths as intangible heritage that could be enhanced by new types of open-air, mobile, and public museum activities; to re-imagine interactions between places and stakeholders; to promote dialogues between transgenerational non specialistic-audiences and academic, cultural, and institutional actors (i.e. universities, museums, local administrations and institutions).

The project features two other units, one coordinated by Filippo Milani at the University of Bologna and one coordinated by Luca Daconto the University of Milano Bicocca.

The Research Unit based at the University of Padua, coordinated by Giada Peterle, promotes an art-geography collaboration to explore walking as a mobile and creative method, and to reflect on the ways in which urban cultures can be shaped and resignified through creative and narrative practices. In particular, this Unit contributes to current research in literary geographies; literary urban studies; mobility studies; and geohumanities, and, from a methodological perspective, it works with a geocritical approach to urban mobilities and walking narratives; art-based and creative methods; mobile and auto-ethno-graphic methods.

This Research Unit is sustained by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and Humanities (MoHu) and the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua.

The WALC project collaborates also with the Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité Network of the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues – CRPM, Université Paris Nanterre

The WALC PRIN project runs the NaMUC (Narrative Mobilities of Urban Cultures) seminar series, which includes seminars hosted at the MoHu Centre, the Museum of Geography, and also on the move across multiple urban spaces