On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments and academic malpractices in Italy, and how these factors affect Italian scholarship in the history of science.

Subject of the study are intentional communities with a strong emphasis on sustainable development. The study explores ecovillages and other socio-ecological communities in their role as lifestyle avant-gardes and as pioneers of sustainable development. Main interest is both the sustainability and the innovation potential of such communities.…[Read more]

Book review of the book by Marco Leonardi (“Renaissance Quarterly,” Volume 71, n. 4, 2018, pp. 1489-1491).

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The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of…[Read more]

The Line of Control arbitrarily bifurcates Neelum valley, Kashmir into Pakistan and India. While the border attempts to constrain and categorize, the daily movements and flows of human and more-than-human bodies via “unofficial” routes and routines generate an understanding of Kashmir that is not dependent on geopolitics. Neelum as sculpted and…[Read more]

Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the…[Read more]

This essay is an attempt to think about melancholy as a shared creative endeavor, as a trans-corporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together in what Tim Ingold has called a meshwork. In this enmeshment of the “strange strangers” of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, “[t]he only way out is down” a…[Read more]

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that ‘energy’, when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of ‘energies’, derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It propose…[Read more]

Christina McPhee’s ‘commonplace book’ draws from a palimpsest of handwritten notes, lists, quotations, bibliographic fragments, and sketches, from an artist whose voracious reading practice is a direct feed into her life and art — all set to a visual and textual design-as-score, as prominent writers on painting, media arts, performance, video i…[Read more]

Los profesores en ejercicio y en formación de las diferentes especialidades técnicas encontraran en este folleto aspectos muy valiosos relacionados con diferentes actividades para el perfeccionamiento de la dimensión ambiental en la asignatura Medios Tecnológicos de la especialidad Mantenimiento y Reparación de los Medios de Transporte. Adem…[Read more]

El trabajo aborda la sistematización de los resultados científicos del proyecto Gestión Ambiental, en sus dos etapas, 2009-2012 y 2013-2016. Se obtuvieron 16 resultados científicos que posibilitaron el diseño de dos cursos en el Congreso Internacional Pedagogía 2009, 2011, 2013. Se defendieron 5 tesis doctorales relacionadas al proyecto. Los ejes…[Read more]

The aim of this course is to explore the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality in the literature of Medieval and Renaissance Southern Europe. We will approach questions such as the status of women and the context of misogyny, the societal role of same-sex relations, the presentation and visualization of sexuality, desire and the body. We…[Read more]

In the summer of 1704, Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), the preeminent Italian physician and natural philosopher of his time, traveled with a “daring soul” and “trembling feet” across the “silent horrors” of the northern Apennines: down the hills south of Reggio Emilia to northern Tuscany and the western edge of his native land, the Province of G…[Read more]

in: Nel nome di Lazzaro. Saggi di storia della scienza e delle istituzioni scientifiche tra il XVII e il XVIII secolo, edited by Centro Studi Lazzaro Spallanzani, Bologna, Edizioni Pendragon, 2014, pp. 207-220.

Scholarship on the Pearl-poem has seen a significant jump in recent years, due largely to the influx of eco-critical readings throughout Medieval studies. Gillian Rudd’s recent book Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature explores a new and exciting reading of the poem’s natural environment, claiming that the rose met…[Read more]

Syllabus for an undergraduate course on Erving Goffman.

A syllabus for an undergraduate animal studies course.