Visiting Fellows

Pierre Destrée is Senior Research Associate at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at UCLouvain. After completing degrees in Philosophy and Classical Philology (Greek and Latin), he obtained his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Aristotle’s metaphysics under the supervision of Jacques Taminiaux and Pierre Aubenque. Before joining FNRS in 1998, he held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Paris IV-Sorbonne, the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

His research focuses on three main areas. The first is the ethics and political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, on which he has published extensively, including The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics and the co-edited volumes Plato and the Poets, Plato and Myth, Plato and the Power of Images, and Plato’s Symposium: A Critical Guide. His current work includes a monograph on Diogenes the Cynic (with Monte Johnson) and the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Ancient Cynicism. A second area concerns ancient aesthetics, from Gorgias to Longinus. He has published a French translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (forthcoming in English with Cambridge University Press), is preparing a commentary on Longinus’ On the Sublime, and has co-edited The Poetics in Its Aristotelian Context and The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Aesthetics. His third research interest is humour in ancient philosophy, to which he has devoted numerous articles, the Oxford volume Laughter, Humor and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy, and two monographs currently in preparation.

A former Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, he has also held fellowships at the University of St Andrews, Princeton University, and the University of Notre Dame. He has lectured extensively at leading universities in Europe and the Americas, including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and UCLA.

CECIL project: Plato’s humour

Plato’s humour is becoming an important topic in Plato’s scholarship. As several authors have now demonstrated (notably Nightingale, Capra, and Trivigno), Plato regularly uses humour as a kind of rhetorical device in his dialogues. In Pisa, I focused on two papers:

• In my paper on Irony, I try to respond to Melissa Lane’s articles which defend an ‘anti-ironic’ reading of eirôneia in Plato. I argue that eirôneia should be taken as a kind of humorous device meant to help Plato’s reader to become critical of the values defended by Socrates’ interlocutors.
• In my paper on ‘Humour and Sex in Plato’, I try to show how Plato uses in the philosophical way one of the commonest humorous device, ie jokes based on, or related to, sex, in some of his dialogues (Rep, Symp., and Gorgias).

I am a tenured (full) professor in Latvian linguistics at the Department of Latvian and Baltic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia.

My research interests include morphology, derivational morphology, morphosyntax and morphophonology, functional grammar, pragmatics, modality, and evidentiality. My main research is focused on Latvian grammar and theory of grammar.

I am the author of several monographs and edited volumes, including “Morfēmika un morfonoloģija” Morphemics and Morphophonology, “Morfoloģijas stilistika” Stylistics of Morphology, “A Typological Perspective on Latvian Grammar” (2014), “Latvian Grammar” (2021; with Ilze Lokmane), and “Insights into the Baltic and Finnic Languages. Contacts, Comparisons and Changes” (2022; eds. Helle Metslang, Miina Norvik, Andra Kalnača). I am the editor-in-chief of the journal “Valoda: nozīme un forma / Language: Meaning and Form” (https://doi.org/10.22364/vnf).

CECIL project: Typology of linking elements in Latvian: data-driven analysis of the “Database of Latvian morphemes and derivational models”

The motivation for this project was related to the desire to continue the research topic on the structure of the Latvian language, with a particular focus on morphemics and word formation, as well as to view it in the context of the use of modern digital resources. Therefore, during the CECIL Visiting Fellowship at the University of Pisa, there was an excellent scientific work opportunity that allowed me to focus on the intended research, which will lead to a publication on “Word-medial Elements in Latvian Compounds: A Corpus-based Study” (authors – Andra Kalnača, Tatjana Pakalne, forthcoming). The idea of the study consists in extracting all compound lemmas from the “Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian via the “Database of Latvian Morphemes and Derivational Models” (ongoing project by the Department of Latvian and Baltic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia as part of the Latvian Council of Science’s programme, project leader Andra Kalnača) and performing a quantitative and qualitative analysis of lemmas containing vs. not containing word-medial elements. The main findings of the study are as follows (discussed in more detail in a forthcoming publication):

1. Corpus data enable a data-driven typology of Latvian compounds, based on two key dimensions: the form of the left-hand constituent and the presence or absence – as well as the type – of word-medial elements.
2. Latvian employs both major compounding strategies with respect to left-hand constituents: the use of whole words and of bare stems.
3. Among declinable left-hand constituents, however, the bare-stem strategy is predominant in quantitative terms, making it the preferred structural pattern overall.

🇮🇹 Bernhard Pattis ha studiato Germanistica e Latino presso le università di Vienna, Innsbruck e Siena, nonché pedagogia strumentale con specializzazione in organo e cembalo presso l’Università di musica e arti dello spettacolo di Vienna. Dal 2019 al 2023 è stato collaboratore scientifico nel progetto A03 «Purismo – discorsi e pratiche della purezza linguistica», diretto dal Prof. Dr. Jörg Robert e dalla Prof.ssa Dr. Sarah Dessì Schmid, nell’ambito del SFB 1391 «Andere Ästhetik» presso l’Università di Tubinga. In tale contesto ha conseguito il dottorato nel 2023 con una tesi dedicata al principe Ludwig, alla Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft e alla traduzione dei Trionfi di Francesco Petrarca da parte di Ludwig di Anhalt-Köthen, pubblicata nel 2025 presso l’editore De Gruyter con il titolo Spracharbeit und Literaturreform. Fürst Ludwigs von Anhalt-Köthen Petrarca-Übersetzung und das Sprachprojekt der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft. Dal mese di ottobre 2025 è collaboratore scientifico presso la cattedra di Letteratura tedesca moderna (Prof.ssa Dr. Astrid Dröse) dell’Istituto di Germanistica del Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). I suoi principali interessi di ricerca comprendono la letteratura dei secoli XVI e XVII, il transfer letterario e culturale dall’età moderna al XIX secolo (in particolare tra Italia e Germania), la ricezione dell’antico nella letteratura tedesca, i processi e le forme del lavoro linguistico, del purismo e del patriottismo linguistico/nazionalismo linguistico in Germania (XVII–XIX secolo), la poetica e l’estetica nella prima età moderna, nonché il rapporto intermediale tra musica e letteratura dalla prima età moderna fino all’età contemporanea (in particolare cantata, ode, Lied e narrazioni musicali). Attualmente Pattis sta lavorando a una ricerca di abilitazione sulla storia letteraria della cantata nell’area di lingua tedesca.

Progetto CECIL: Purificazione linguistica come fenomeno interculturale (Germania–Italia) nella prima età moderna

Il progetto di ricerca dal titolo Purificazione linguistica come fenomeno interculturale (Germania–Italia) nella prima età moderna è incentrato sulla questione del rapporto tra il purismo linguistico italiano e quello tedesco, concentrandosi sui processi di ricezione e trasformazione dei modelli linguistici e letterari italiani nell’area di lingua tedesca. Un’attenzione particolare è rivolta alla tradizione della «questione della lingua» e al suo influsso sulla riflessione linguistica tedesca del XVII secolo. Nell’ambito del soggiorno di ricerca presso l’Università di Pisa, l’indagine si è concentrata soprattutto su Dante e sulla ricezione della sua opera nell’area di lingua tedesca, analizzando il ruolo attribuito al poeta fiorentino quale modello linguistico, letterario e culturale dagli autori impegnati nel «lavoro sulla lingua». L’analisi delle fonti italiane ha permesso di chiarire in che modo concetti, paradigmi e strategie elaborati nella cultura umanistico-rinascimentale siano stati recepiti, adattati e reinterpretati in Germania, dove la traduzione e l’adattamento delle opere italiane costituirono strumenti fondamentali di transfer e di «naturalizzazione» delle conquiste letterarie straniere, contribuendo alla formazione di una letteratura nazionale e di una specifica identità culturale. In questa prospettiva, il progetto evidenzia il carattere profondamente interculturale del purismo linguistico, inteso come fenomeno strutturalmente comparativo e transnazionale, nonché il ruolo centrale della tradizione italiana nello sviluppo della riflessione linguistica e poetologica tedesca della prima età moderna, la cui portata può essere compresa solo all’interno di dinamiche culturali europee condivise.

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🇬🇧 Bernhard Pattis studied German Studies and Latin at the Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck, and Siena, as well as Instrumental Music Education with a specialization in organ and harpsichord at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. From 2019 to 2023, he was a research associate in Project A03, “Purism – Discourses and Practices of Linguistic Purity,” directed by Prof. Dr. Jörg Robert and Prof. Dr. Sarah Dessì Schmid within the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1391 “Andere Ästhetik” at the University of Tübingen. In this context, he completed his doctorate in 2023 with a dissertation on Prince Ludwig, the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, and Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen’s translation of Francesco Petrarch’s “Trionfi”. The dissertation was published by De Gruyter in 2025 under the title Spracharbeit und Literaturreform. Fürst Ludwigs von Anhalt-Köthen Petrarca-Übersetzung und das Sprachprojekt der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft. Since October 2025, he has been a research associate at the Chair of Modern German Literature (Prof. Dr. Astrid Dröse) in the Institute of German Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). His principal research interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature; literary and cultural transfer from the early modern period to the nineteenth century (particularly between Italy and Germany); the reception of classical antiquity in German literature; the processes and forms of linguistic cultivation, linguistic purism, and linguistic patriotism/linguistic nationalism in Germany (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries); poetics and aesthetics in the early modern period; and the intermedial relationship between music and literature from the early modern era to the present, with particular emphasis on the cantata, ode, Lied, and musical narratives. He is currently working on a Habilitation-project devoted to the literary history of the cantata in the German-speaking world.

CECIL project: Linguistic Purification as an Intercultural Phenomenon (Germany–Italy) in the Early Modern Period

The research project entitled Linguistic Purification as an Intercultural Phenomenon (Germany–Italy) in the Early Modern Period focuses on the relationship between Italian and German linguistic purism. The project examines processes of reception and transformation of Italian linguistic and literary models in the German-speaking area. Particular attention is devoted to the tradition of the “questione della lingua” and its influence on German linguistic thought in the seventeenth century. During the research stay at the University of Pisa, the investigation concentrated especially on Dante and on the reception of his work in the German-speaking world, analysing the role attributed to the Florentine poet as a linguistic, literary, and cultural model by authors engaged in “language work.” The analysis of Italian sources made it possible to clarify how concepts, paradigms, and strategies developed within humanistic and Renaissance culture were received, adapted, and reinterpreted in Germany, where the translation and adaptation of Italian works constituted fundamental instruments of transfer and “naturalization” of foreign literary achievements, thereby contributing to the formation of a national literature and a distinct cultural identity. From this perspective, the project highlights the profoundly intercultural character of linguistic purism, understood as a structurally comparative and transnational phenomenon, as well as the central role of the Italian tradition in the development of early modern German linguistic and poetological reflection, whose scope can only be fully understood within the framework of shared European cultural dynamics.

Christian Rivoletti is full professor of Romance Philology at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he has been awarded a prestigious Heisenberg Professorship by the German Council of Research (2015-20), and where he has served as director of the Institute for Romance Studies (2019-21). He is Vice President of the German Association for Italian Studies and a member of the scientific committee of the Sigismondo Malatesta Foundation. He was previously a member of research groups at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy), a visiting scholar at the Collège de France and a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation.

He has studied the Italian Renaissance and its European reception (Ariosto e l’ironia della finzione, Marsilio, 2014), literary utopias, the early modern reception of the Greek novel (Heliodorus Redivivus, Steiner, 2018), modern and contemporary narrative (Forme del realismo nella letteratura italiana tra modernismo e contemporaneità, thematic issue of Allegoria, 2016), literary theory and literary criticism. He has also edited three volumes by Erich Auerbach: Romanticismo e realismo e altri scritti su Dante, Vico e l’Illuminismo (Edizioni della Normale, 2010); Kultur als Politik. Aufsätze aus dem Exil zur Geschichte und Zukunft Europas (1938-1947) (Konstanz UP, 2014; Spanish transl.: La cultura como política, El cuenco de plata, 2017; Japanese transl.: 文学と戦争ーヨーロッパの歴史と文化に関する亡命者の思索（1938－1947）[Literature and War: Reflections from Exile on European History and Culture (1938-1947)], Hosei UP, 2025) and Letteratura, guerra e storia dell’Europa. Saggi dall’esilio (1938-1947), Marsilio, forthcoming.

CECIL project: Language, Literature, National Identity, and the History of Europe: Erich Auerbach’s Exile Essays (1939–47)

As a CECIL Visiting Fellow, he will investigate the role of language as a factor of national cohesion and cultural identity through the work of the German philologist Erich Auerbach during his exile in Istanbul (1936–1947). Building on Auerbach’s Turkish essays—long overlooked and only recently republished and translated—the project explores how debates on language reform, literary tradition, and European cultural heritage informed the intellectual context in which his main work, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, was conceived. By examining these writings from a comparative and theoretical perspective, the research addresses the relationship between language, literature, and nation-building, while also considering the role of translation across European and non-European contexts.

David van Schoor is a South African classicist based in the United States. He majored in Latin and Greek at the University of Cape Town and received his PhD in ancient Greek from the University of Zurich in 2018. Until 2022 he was senior lecturer in Classics at Rhodes University in Makhanda/ Grahamstown, South Africa. From 2022-2023 he was a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. Since June 2023, he has been assistant professor in ancient Greek at Emory University in Atlanta. He has taught, lectured and given papers in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. Most recently, his translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was adapted for performance by Theater Emory in Atlanta in April 2025. He was visiting fellow at the Future of the Past Lab at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in September 2025, and organized the colloquium ‘Translation in A Golden Age’ at the Center for Hellenic Studies in November 2025.

His chief intellectual interests are in Archaic and Classical Greek literature and thought, questions of agency and personhood, the discourse of modernity, and what African thinkers may do with ancient ideas. His current and ongoing writing projects include translations with commentary of Greek dramas, a monograph on the interpretation of Greek literature in the 21st Century, and essays exploring the ideas of Greece and of Rome in modern German ideas, and in contemporary African, and American thought.

CECIL project: The Black Dionysus Project: Translating and Interpreting Ancient and Early Modern Texts

During his time as a CECIL fellow in Spring 2026, David van Schoor worked on his The Black Dionysus Project: Translating and Interpreting Ancient and Early Modern Texts. This entailed translating and preparing for submission the manuscripts of his translations of Lysistrata, Oedipus Turannos and Persians. In addition to working on the explanatory commentaries and essays accompanying these works, he also successfully completed an extensive piece on the interpretation and translation of Vergil’s bucolic works in South Africa, 1925-2025.

The experience in Pisa was a godsend. The stimulating conditions were perfect for getting a lot of intensive work done, while also being able to benefit from the relaxing conditions of Italy in Spring. Pisa, with its several universities, excellent libraries, its perfect size and location in Tuscany, was an ideal place to be gifted the opportunity of this marvelous fellowship. The colleagues in philology at the University of Pisa were warm and welcoming, and unforgettably generous with their time.

Andrea Vestrucci (PhD, PhD, FISSR) è Associate Professor presso l’ILT College, Brookings, US, e opera nel gruppo di AI Systems Engineering dell’Università di Bamberga. La sua ricerca si colloca all’intersezione tra logica matematica, metamatematica, metodi formali, intelligenza artificiale simbolica e filosofia dell’AI. Studia in particolare la meccanizzazione del ragionamento logico e matematico (i teoremi d’incompletezza di Gödel, la diagonalizzazione) mediante proof assistants, in particolare Isabelle/HOL. Un secondo filone riguarda le logiche non classiche, le ontologie di valori e gli approcci ibridi alla trustworthy AI, con applicazioni alla governance, alle Smart Cities, alle applicazioni ospedaliere e ai sistemi agentici. Si occupa inoltre dei limiti epistemologici e semantici dei Large Language Models in domini sensibili quali religione, diritto e decisione normativa. Tra i suoi lavori recenti figurano uno studio computazionale dell’enunciato di Gödel corredato da una riformulazione categoriale (Archive for Mathematical Logic), una tassonomia delle meccanizzazioni dei teoremi d’incompletezza (Logic and Logical Philosophy) e una formalizzazione in Isabelle/HOL di ontologie di valore e preferenze ceteris paribus per la governance delle Smart Cities (CEUR WS, forthcoming).

CECIL project: Large Language Models nella formalizzazione di disposizioni dell’AI Act europeo

Durante la visitingship, Andrea Vestrucci ha avviato con Alessandro Lenci, Lucia Passaro e Mattia Proietti uno studio esplorativo sull’impiego dei Large Language Models nella formalizzazione di disposizioni dell’AI Act europeo. Il progetto mira a valutare se un modello linguistico possa tradurre testi normativi in rappresentazioni di Higher-Order Logic implementabili in Isabelle/HOL, preservando agenti, condizioni, obblighi, divieti, eccezioni e relazioni temporali. Vestrucci ha proposto l’impostazione logico-formale, predisposto encoding manuali di riferimento mediante una logica deontica agentiva con operatori STIT, selezionato la bibliografia e contribuito alla definizione del protocollo sperimentale. Un primo test few-shot con GPT-5.1 ha confrontato gli encoding generati con quelli manuali tramite metriche di similarità e controllo semantico. Alcuni lemmi sono stati verificati in Isabelle e sono risultati sintatticamente corretti. L’analisi ha però mostrato che la somiglianza testuale può dipendere dalla riproduzione di un template, senza garantire una comprensione adeguata del formalismo. I prossimi sviluppi prevedono test zero-shot e few-shot controllati, modelli diversi, […].

🇮🇹 Dorota Kozakiewicz-Kłosowska, dottore di ricerca in Linguistica, è responsabile della Sezione di Lingua Italiana alla Facoltà di Linguistica Applicata dell’Università di Varsavia e presiede la Commissione d’Esame di Lingua Italiana dell’Ateneo. Si occupa di concettualizzazione linguistica, gli esponenti lessicali della qualità della vita nei media, innovazioni linguistiche e linguistica contrastiva (italiano, polacco, inglese). È cofondatrice dei gruppi di ricerca internazionali TRANSIT (transfer culturale) e MICROFORMA (forme brevi) e direttrice responsabile della rivista bilingue Gazzetta Italia.

Durante il soggiorno come Visiting Fellow presso il Dipartimento ha svolto attività di ricerca e divulgazione legate al progetto Esplorare la linguistica contrastiva: uno studio sulle strutture del polacco e dell’italiano per un migliore uso pratico della competenza linguistica, dedicato alla linguistica contrastiva fra l’italiano e altre lingue, con l’obiettivo di favorirne un uso più consapevole in contesti didattici e comunicativi. Le attività didattiche prevedevano incontri con studenti di corsi triennali e magistrali, durante i quali si è riflettuto sul valore dell’analisi contrastiva e sulla riconsiderazione di alcune strutture linguistiche spesso classificate come “errori” nei manuali per apprendenti di lingua italiana a stranieri. L’approccio ha mirato a valorizzare tali fenomeni come strumenti di riflessione linguistica e metalinguistica, con un’attenzione particolare alle somiglianze e differenze tra le lingue europee. Sono stati inoltre organizzati seminari per studenti di area slavistica, dedicati all’analisi comparativa dell’aspetto verbale in polacco e in italiano e alle strategie di traduzione di strutture sintattiche marcate. L’attività di ricerca ha incluso la progettazione, sperimentazione e diffusione di un questionario destinato a studenti e docenti universitari, finalizzato a raccogliere dati sull’interferenza linguistica.

🇬🇧 Dorota Kozakiewicz-Kłosowska, PhD in Linguistics, is Head of the Italian Language Section at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw and chairs the University Examination Board for Italian Language. Her research interests include linguistic conceptualization, lexical means of quality of life in the media, linguistic innovation, and contrastive linguistics (Italian, Polish, English). She is co-founder of the international research groups TRANSIT (cultural transfer) and MICROFORMA (short forms), and editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal Gazzetta Italia.

During her stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Department, she carried out research and outreach activities related to the project Exploring Contrastive Linguistics: A Study of Polish and Italian Structures for a More Effective Practical Use of Language Competence, devoted to contrastive linguistics between Italian and other languages, with the aim of promoting a more conscious use of linguistic competence in educational and communicative contexts. The teaching activities included meetings with undergraduate and graduate students, focused on the value of contrastive analysis and on re-evaluating linguistic structures often labeled as “errors” in Italian language textbooks for foreign learners. This approach aimed to highlight such phenomena as tools for linguistic and metalinguistic reflection, with particular attention to similarities and differences among European languages. Additional seminars were held for students in Slavic Studies, dedicated to the comparative analysis of verbal aspect in Polish and Italian and to translation strategies for marked syntactic structures. The research activities also involved the design, testing, and dissemination of a questionnaire for university students and teachers, aimed at collecting data on linguistic interference.

Dr Vera Alexander is Senior Lecturer/University Lecturer in European Literatures and Cultures: English at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She has research expertise in English and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures with a particular interest in  human and more-than-human life writing, the environmental humanities, creative-critical writing, heterotopia, diaspora, and transculturality. She has published a monograph on migration and education in writings of the Indian Diaspora, several recent articles on garden life writings, and she recently co-edited a volume titled European Spaces of Conflict: Past, Present and Future.

Project: “Philology, meet the Environmental Humanities”

We are living in interesting times of rapid change and volatility. This has knock-on effects on our knowledge cultures, academic practices and scholarly discourses. Since the Enlightenment, western philologies have put human affairs at the centre of attention, often at the expense of more-than-human lives and spaces. In recent years, the environmental humanities have proposed ways of reimagining our relations to the natural world. Focusing on garden writings, this project looks at creative-critical opportunities offered by these circumstances, such as presented by the emergence of new dynamic vocabularies, discourses and methodologies that embrace relational perspectives. Gardens are sites of encounter with more-than-human agents. Being familiar spaces, often associated with recreation and enjoyment, they are sites where new concepts and vocabularies emerge.  I will be working on an chapter on gardens and the imagination, analysing how visible and invisible more-than-human relationalities are framed in order to come to terms with present day emergences and emergencies.

I plan to engage in dialogue and collaboration with colleagues at the university of Pisa to discuss and compare ongoing changes in vocabulary, discourse, methodology and embodied knowledge practice  in the humanities and philologies in the Netherlands and in Italy. I look forward to sharing my expertise in present day life writing and to learning from colleagues specialising in poetry and fiction to analyse recent literary works that reframe humans and the humanities in the current climate of change and embrace new avenues of analysis.

Giuseppe Pezzini is Tutor and Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which he joined in 2021 after five enriching years at St Andrews (2016–2021) and research fellowships at Magdalen College, Oxford (2013–2015), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016). He worked as an Assistant Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin (completed in 2013) and has published extensively on Latin language and literature, the philosophy of language, the reception of the Classics, and the theory of fiction, both ancient and modern. His scholarly contributions include three books (notably a monograph on the verb ‘to be’ in Latin, Oxford 2015), four edited volumes (including a major study of Early Latin language, co-edited with James N. Adams and Anna Chahoud, Cambridge 2023), and more than fifty peer-reviewed articles. He was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2019 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2021.

A tool for improving Latin reading skills

The aim of his CECIL project is to address the increasing challenges faced by students in learning Latin by developing a tool that goes beyond both traditional grammatical methods and living language approaches, such as Ørberg’s method, while also incorporating aspects of both. The project adopts a primarily text-based methodology, focusing on enhancing students’ reading skills at both secondary school and university levels. It seeks to produce an anthology of original ancient texts, encompassing a range of synchronic and diachronic variations, and organised by grammatical and lexical difficulty.

Stefano Redaelli is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw, Poland. From the University of Warsaw he got both his PhDs degree, in Physics and in Literature. His research focuses on the intersection between Literature, Medicine, Science and Spirituality. His book publications include: Esercizi di squilibrio. Per imparare a prendersi cura di sé e dell’altro (Città Nuova 2024), Psicopatografie. Il racconto della malattia mentale nella narrativa italiana del XXI secolo (Peter Lang, 2023), Critica e cura. La follia prima e dopo Basaglia (with Ivan Dimitrijević, Paolo Loffredo Editore, 2022), A 40 anni dalla legge Basaglia: la follia, tra immaginario letterario e realtà psichiatrica (DiG, 2020), Nel varco tra le due culture. Letteratura e scienza in Italia (Bulzoni, 2016). He also serves on the Scientific Committee of „Centro Studi Medical Humanities” of the University of Bologna.

Family Illness Narratives: il racconto della malattia dalla prospettiva dei familiari nella narrativa italiana contemporanea

As a CECIL Visiting Fellow, he aims at analyzing a corpus of contemporary Italian illness narratives where the narrator is not the patient, as it is most often the case, but a close family member. He will explore whether, and how, narrative models, myths and metaphors of illness shift into these accounts influencing the shaping of the language, with a particular focus on the case of Alzheimer’s disease.

After her BA and MA in Classics in Padua (IT) and Dijon (FR), Giulia Dovico carried out her doctoral studies between Cologne (DE), Padua (IT), and Berkeley (USA). For her PhD, she produced a new critical edition of scholia (i.e. ancient marginal exegetical commentaries) to Euripides’ Medea, which she is now reworking for publication. She held a position at the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” in Hamburg (DE) and was awarded, among others, a grant from the Fondation Hardt (CH) and a grant from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. From January 2025, she will be working as a DFG-Walter Benjamin Fellow at the universities of Groningen and Leiden (NE), inquiring into the role(s) of figurative language in ancient literary-critical writings in relation to the varying degrees of literariness and technicality they display. Combining literary and textual critical approaches, her research mainly focuses on the transmission of Aristophanic comedies, ancient Greek scholarship (especially Greek scholiography to Euripides), and ancient literary criticism.

How to Write Good Greek. Language Correctness and Classicism in Ancient Scholarship

At CECIL, she sets out to analyse how literary tradition and everyday usage contributed to the definition of language correctness in a context like the ancient Greek one in which the literary tradition, while being perceived and presented as an authoritative model, was very much detached from everyday usage of both educated and uneducated people. In those cases in which the two criteria were in contrast, which one—to the ancient grammarian’s mind—was more likely to unveil the correct linguistic form?

Writing about Literature: A Pragmatic Approach (Teaching)

Biography as a Genre: A 19^th-Century Case Study (Research)

Etta Madden is Professor of English, Emerita, and formerly Clif & Gail Smart Professor at Missouri State University, with an emphasis on American literature. Her research and teaching have focused on US writers in Italy, American communal groups and utopian literature, and recovering lesser-known US women writers. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the Università degli Studi di Catania, and a recipient of Mellon research fellowships at the New York Public Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Her books include Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks (SUNY Press 2022), Eating in Eden: Food & American Utopias (U Nebraska 2006) and Bodies of Life: Shaker Literature and Literacies (Greenwood 1998). She is now researching and writing a biography of translator and author Caroline Crane Marsh, wife of the US Minister to Italy (1861-1882). Recent essays related to this project, on Marsh’s translations and her involvement in her husband’s groundbreaking environmental study, Man and Nature (1864), have appeared in Transatlantica: American Studies Journal and Rivista italiana di filosofia politica.

As a CECIL Visiting Fellow, she is delivering two series of seminars for advanced students, first on the topic of Pulitzer-Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories within the context of short fiction and translation and second, on composition theory for writing about literary research. Additionally, she continues her research on Caroline Crane Marsh’s biography, with an emphasis on her time in Tuscany.

Percezioni di multilinguismo: lingue e potere politico nel Mediterraneo Orientale antico (I millennio a.C.)

Marco Santini is Fellow by Examination in Ancient History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He earned a BA and MA in Classics and Ancient History from the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa, and a PhD in Ancient History from Princeton University. During his doctoral studies, he participated in several exchange programs with the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich. After completing his doctorate, he taught at Princeton as Postgraduate Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Classics. He has recently been appointed Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh, where he will begin to work in 2025.

He has published articles on the interplay between language and political power in the Iron Age Near East, on the Anatolian roots of the concept of tyranny as well as on ethnicity and multiculturalism in Classical and Hellenistic Caria, with a special focus on Halikarnassos. He is currently working on a monograph which argues for the existence of shared patterns in political thought and practice across Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant during the Iron Age (ca. 1200–600 BC).

As a CECIL Visiting Fellow, he has delivered a series of seminars for advanced students on the topic Percezioni di multilinguismo: lingue e potere politico nel Mediterraneo Orientale antico (I millennio a.C.). Themes treated included the use of language in conceptualizations of ethnicity, cross-cultural transmission of terminology of power, multilingualism and multiculturalism among communities of mercenaries.