2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

celebrate the value of a profession: collective biographies of jurists,
physicians, poets, artists were thus extensively produced, while
the literary genre was progressively refined and codified. From this
there resulted what Dionisotti has defined as the historiography of a
certain number of castes, claiming distinction not simply in cultural
terms but also on the social and political ground, in order to improve
their ranking in the social hierarchy. These issues were the object of a
lecture that I gave at CUNY at the end of November, and of an essay
concentrating on a single case-study that will be published in 2012.
During the semester I also worked on the cultural engagements
of those same “excellent personae,” starting from the analysis of
catalogues of their libraries attached to their post-mortem inventories.
This allowed me to reconstruct the antiquarian and scientific
interests of the Roman “Republican of Letters” Giovanni Ciampini,
on whom I gave a lecture at the Yale Working Group in Book History
that took place at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Last but not least, the semester at the Italian Academy gave me
the opportunity to participate in very thought-provoking discussions
either on my own research or on other very engaging topics and
theoretical issues, both in the weekly seminars and in more general
workshops on the relationships among art, culture and science, two
of which were organized at Columbia University and one at Harvard.
Renata Ago returns to her position as professor of early modern history at the
department of Storia, Culture, Religioni at Sapienza Università di Roma.
Maria Brincker
This has been an utterly fantastic year as an Arts and Neuroscience
Fellow here at the Italian Academy. As an early-career academic
I cannot think of a better platform to launch and deepen one’s
research. I have had unparalleled opportunities to participate and
engage with first-class scholars in my interdisciplinary field, amid
philosophy, neuroscience and psychology; chiefly right here at the
Italian Academy, with Director David Freedberg, with the other Fellows,
and at prestigious events like the big “Brainbeat” conference
held here in December.
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