Meet Our Instructors

Faculty in Residence

Each quarter, one Stanford professor serves as Faculty in Residence in each of the BOSP program locations. These faculty teach classes in their own disciplines, developing courses that incorporate unique features of the local culture and environment or that provide comparative perspectives on a particular topic. View a list of current and future faculty.

2026-2027 Academic Year
Local Faculty

Alessio Assonitis

Alessio Assonitis arrived at the Medici Archive Project in 2004 with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He became director in 2009 and served as Principal Investigator for digital projects supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation (including BIA, 2010-2012; 2013-2014, and MIA, 2015-2017; 2017-2019) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (AVVISO Project, 2021-23). He has published extensively on topics related to Italian Renaissance art, book history, Medici history, archival studies and digital humanities, including the monograph "Bastiano Mainardi: Painter of Altarpieces in Renaissance Tuscany" (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2011) and the edited volumes "The Grand Ducal Medici and Their Archive 1537–1743" (with Brian Sandberg; Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2016); "Fra Bartolomeo 1517" (with Marilena Tamassia; Nerbini Editore, 2019), and "A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici" (with Henk van Veen; Brill, 2021). He is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Memorie Domenicane and founder and former editor-in-chief of the MEDICI ARCHIVE PROJECT academic book series (Harvey Miller/Brepols), established in 2016.

Ugo Biggeri

Ugo Biggeri serves as the European representative for the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, a global network of sustainable banks. He is also the President of Shareholders for Change, a network of European institutional investors promoting active shareholding on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. A founding member of Banca Etica in Italy, he served as its president until 2019, overseeing a credit portfolio of €1.2 billion. Biggeri holds a PhD in Physics from the University Federico II in Naples, and has specializations in Sustainable Development from the University of Trento and in Business Management from Bocconi University in Milan. He teaches Ethical Finance and Microcredit at the University of Florence, and is deeply committed to social justice and ecological issues, actively promoting initiatives and campaigns with Italian NGOs.

Deborah Bottazzi

Deborah Bottazzi holds a B.A. in Teaching Italian Language and Culture to Foreigners, an M.A. in Textual Skills for Publishing, Teaching and Tourism Promotion, and a second Master’s in Teaching Italian as a Second and Foreign Language. She also holds a DITALS certification, levels I and II, issued by the Università per Stranieri di Siena. She collaborates with the Center for CILS (certificate of Italian as a Second Language) and has worked in private schools teaching English and Italian. Her teaching philosophy rests upon the idea that in the classroom each student, regardless of their level and ability, finds a motivating space where to improve their language and communication skills before bringing them in their everyday life and interaction with the Italians.

Nicola Cacciatore

Nicola Cacciatore was awarded a doctoral degree in history from the University of Strathclyde in 2019. His interests include European anti-fascism and the interactions between the Allies and the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, both within and outside Italy. He has worked as an Assegnista di Ricerca at the Universities of Florence and Padua on projects concerning, respectively, anti-fascist exiles and European nationalist networks. He is currently collaborating with the Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri on a project focusing on escaped Allied Prisoners of War in Italy after 8 September 1943 and their relationship with the local population.

Ermelinda M. Campani

Ermelinda M. Campani is the Spogli Family Director of Stanford's Breyer Center for Overseas Studies in Florence. A native of Emilia Romagna (Italy), she earned an M.A. in Italian literature and a Ph.D. with an emphasis in film studies from Brown University. Prior to joining Stanford University in 1993, she taught courses both at Brown and Rhode Island School of Design and served as acting director of the Brown University Program in Bologna. She has been teaching film to Stanford undergraduates since 1993. Her teaching and research focus on film history and criticism, film style and interpretation, film culture, modernism and film, feminist film theory. Her published works include a book on Bernardo Bertolucci, one on cinema and the sacred (translated into French in 2007), and a book on cinema's representations of the human body. She has written articles both on European and US film journals, has contributed entries to the encyclopedia of World Cinema and has lectured widely. Her current research revolves around iconology and the film image.

Riccardo Emilio Chesta

Riccardo Emilio Chesta is postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore and COSMOS – Center On Social MOvement Studies. He investigates the social and political dimensions of environmental problems and the intersection between democratic politics and expertise, with a focus on collective action and the participation of lay people. On these topics he has published the book "The Contentious Politics of Expertise. Experts, Activism and Grassroots Environmentalism" (Routledge, 2020). Together with Donatella Della Porta, Daniela Chironi, Stella Christou and Andrea Felicetti, he has published "Pandemic Participation and Communication" (Edward Elgar, 2025). He is Associate Editor of Sociologica. International Journal for Sociological Debate. Previously, he studied Sociology (BSc) at the University of Trento, Social Sciences (MSc) at the EHESS and ENS in Paris and obtained a PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the EUI - European University Institute in Fiesole. He has been Researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, ERC Visiting Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Visiting Scholar at the New York University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Jacopo Custodi

Jacopo Custodi is a Research Fellow in political science at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and an instructor in comparative politics at Georgetown University’s campus in Fiesole. He obtained his PhD cum laude, from the Scuola Normale, in political science and sociology in 2022. His current research focuses on the class dealignment of left-wing parties and its impact on their political communication. Previously, he studied the relationship between left-wing politics and national identities. He is the author of books and journal articles on political communication, nationalism, and party politics. He is the author of "Un’idea di Paese. La nazione nel pensiero di sinistra" (Castelvecchi 2023) and "Radical Left Parties and National Identity in Spain, Italy, and Portugal: Rejecting or Reclaiming the Nation" (Palgrave 2024). His work on the intersection of left-wing politics and nationalism earned him the “Top Cited Article” award from Nations and Nationalism (Wiley) for the 2021–2022 period.

Dario Donetti

Dario Donetti is an Associate Professor of architectural history at the Università di Verona. Additionally, he serves as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, where he previously held the position of Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History from 2019 to 2022. He also collaborates with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz as an Associate Scholar, and prior to this, he was a fellow and an Academic Assistant within the same institute from 2013 to 2019. In 2017 he was a Research Associate at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University. Donetti holds an M.Arch. from the Università degli Studi di Firenze, obtained in 2008, and a Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, completed in 2016. The primary goal of his research is to understand the interdependence between draftsmanship and architectural production, with a focus on issues of authorship and materiality in the early modern period, and a secondary interest in twentieth-century avant-gardes. Among the results of his studies are the exhibition catalog "Giuliano da Sangallo: Disegni degli Uffizi" (Giunti: 2017, coauthored with Sabine Frommel and Marzia Faietti) and the monograph "Francesco da Sangallo e l’identità dell’architettura toscana" (Officina Libraria: 2020). Donetti is also the editor of the volumes "Architecture and Dystopia" (Actar: 2019), "Building with Paper: The Materiality of Renaissance Architectural Drawings" (Brepols: 2021, with Cara Rachele), "Viaggio nel Nord. Studi di cultura visiva in onore di Alessandro Nova" (CentroDi: 2022, with Hana Gründler and Mandy Richter), and "Giuliano da Sangallo e e le arti" (Officina Libraria: 2024, with Sabine Frommel and Alessandro Nova).

Emanuele Ertola

Emanuele Ertola is Research Fellow at the University of Siena, Department of Historical Sciences and Cultural Heritage. His research focuses on Italian colonialism, decolonization, colonial and post-colonial migrations, Fascism. Emanuele holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary History from the University of Florence and a Master’s degree from “La Sapienza” University in Rome. He has authored several significant publications, including “Il colonialismo degli italiani. Storia di un’ideologia” (2022) and “In terra d’Africa. Gli italiani che colonizzarono l’impero” (2017). His most recent book is "Tracce fasciste. L’eredità materiale del Ventennio" (Laterza, 2026).

Valentina Fatichenti

Valentina Fatichenti is a Florence native and holds a Master of Arts in English Language and Literature, with a minor in Scandinavian Studies, from the University of Florence. She also holds a DITALS Level I certification issued by the Università per Stranieri di Siena. She has extensive experience in the field of study abroad in both Italy and the United States, ranging from administration to teaching, and is also a translator from English and Norwegian. She currently collaborates with several U.S. and international study abroad institutions in Florence as an instructor of Italian language and contemporary literature, and has served as the primary Italian lecturer for Benedictine College since 2024. Her teaching approach emphasizes the development of an honest and mutually respectful relationship with students, while drawing on Florence’s rich cultural heritage to make language learning meaningful and engaging.

Nicola Gardini

Nicola Gardini is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of numerous books: novels, poetry collections, literary essays, and translations of poetry from English, Latin, and Greek. As an academic, he has extensively explored the ways in which literature shapes up public imagination, defining itself as a form of knowledge on a par with science. His main fields of interest are Greek and Latin literature, the classical tradition, the Renaissance, modern poetry, rhetoric, translation, and the medical humanities. His book "Viva il latino" (American translation "Long Live Latin", Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2019) became an international bestseller. His most recent publications include monographs on Homer’s "Odyssey", the sense of pain and handwriting. He contributes literary articles to the most important Italian daily newspapers. He is the President of Salani, the Italian publisher of "Harry Potter". He is also very active as a painter. His personal website is www.nicolagardini.com

Mattia Guidi

Mattia Guidi is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Siena, where he has been the coordinator of the PhD Programme in Social Sciences and Humanities (2022–25). He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute. His research focuses on the impact of globalization on political systems and EU macroeconomic governance. He is the author of "Competition Policy Enforcement in EU Member States" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; “Grilli di Cortona” Prize of the Italian Political Science Association for best monograph of a scholar under 40 in 2018), "The Law and Politics of Global Competition" (Oxford University Press, 2022) and, most recently, "Politiche dell’economia globale" (Mondadori Università, 2024). His work has appeared in journals such as "International Organization, Journal of European Public Policy, Socio-Economic Review".

Pegah Zohouri Haghian

Pegah Zohouri is a researcher specializing in Middle Eastern politics, transnational migration, and inclusive social development. She holds a DPhil in Oriental (Middle Eastern) Studies from the University of Oxford, where her dissertation focused on transnational elite networks and knowledge production on Muslims in Europe. She has held academic positions at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she taught courses on Islam, democracy, and modern Iranian history. As a consultant for the United Nations Secretariat, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, she contributed to policy work on social inclusion and sustainable development. Her publications explore themes of social inclusion, religious pluralism, reformist Islamic thought, and Muslim diasporas.

Alessandro Lo Bartolo

Alessandro Lo Bartolo is a Junior Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Pisa and collaborates frequently as a visiting instructor at The Medici Archive Project (Florence). His research focuses on the socio-economic and politico-institutional history of early modern Italy, with a specific focus on Tuscany from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. He is the author of two books: "Nel mezzo del bogliente stagno. Gli ufficiali territoriali dello Stato fiorentino tra sindacato locale e controllo centrale, 1400-1800" [Into the Middle of the Boiling Flood: The Territorial Officers of the Florentine State between Local and Central Control, 1400–1800] (Pisa University Press 2023) and "Il tiranno fiorentino. Vita e leggenda nera di Alessandro de’ Medici" [The Florentine Tyrant: Life and Black Legend of Alessandro de’ Medici] (Laterza, 2025). He has also coedited "Un mare connesso. Europa e mondo islamico nel Mediterraneo" (secoli XV-XIX) [A Connected Sea: Europe and the Islamic World in the Mediterranean, 15th–19th Centuries] (Carocci, 2023) and served as a Research Fellow of the PRIN 2022 project “Constructing Intergenerational Ties: Charity and Welfare in Italy and the Iberian World (16th-19th Centuries)” at the University of Pisa.

Andrea Mattiello

Andrea Mattiello holds a PhD in Byzantine Art History from the University of Birmingham and a PhD in History and Theory of Performance Art from the School for Advanced Studies in Venice. His research interests span medieval, modern, and contemporary art, photography, and architecture, as well as queer art in antiquity, female agency in Byzantium, and Greek-Italian humanism. Alongside his research fellowships, he has lectured at prestigious institutions such as Università IUAV of Venice, Christie’s Education London, Università di Salerno, University of Oxford, and NABA Milan. He co-edited the volume Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean and published in major journals and edited volumes. Dr Mattiello is currently conducting research on humanities and sustainability at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and NABA in Milan.

Dario Miccoli

Dario Miccoli is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice where he also coordinates the MA in TransMediterranean Studies. He holds a PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute of Florence and has been postdoctoral and visiting researcher in France, Israel and Greece. His research and publications mainly deal with the contemporary history and memory of the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and with Israeli literature. He is the author of "A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean" (2022) and "Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s–1950s" (2015) and the editor of "Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature: A Diaspora" (2017).

Vittoria Mollo

Vittoria Mollo is originally from Torino and completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in the United States. She holds a double bachelor’s degree in English and French literature from Scripps College and earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Stanford University in 2021. She has extensive experience teaching Italian language, culture, and literature courses, with a research focus primarily on the Italian Medieval and Renaissance periods. At Stanford, she taught in the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) Program and the Department of French & Italian, served as Director of the Italian Modernities Lecture Series in 2022–23, and worked as Executive Producer and Editor of the Entitled Opinions podcast from 2016 to 2023. She then spent the past two years as a Lecturer in Italian at Southern Methodist University. She has a deep passion for teaching language and for continually enriching her understanding of pedagogy. Her classroom approach blends information with entertainment to foster a supportive and engaging learning environment.

Luca Palozzi

Luca Palozzi is Associate Professor in the History of Medieval Art at the Università di Pisa. He holds a PhD in Art History from the Scuola Normale Superiore. Before joining the Università di Pisa in 2022, he held academic positions at Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the University of Edinburgh. His research has been supported by the Kress Foundation, the Max-Planck Gesellschaft, the British Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Association of Art Historians (now Association for Art History). He specializes in medieval Italian art, namely sculpture, with an emphasis on the relationship between art theory and practice; the dialectic between the different artistic media; materials and techniques; as well as issues of artistic geography, historiography and style. He is also interested in porosities between medieval science and art, in ideas of 'naturalism' and 'the real', and in how knowledge of the natural world was experienced, created, organized, and shared during the Middle Ages. He has worked with Ariella Minden on the topic of artistic failure, and an edited volume is underway. Research events organized include the exploratory seminars "Casting the Real in the Middle Ages" (with Emanuele Lugli), that were held at the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of York in 2017, and at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. In 2020, he co-organized with Ariella Minden and Alessandro Nova the international conference "Failure: Understanding Art as Process, 1150-1750" at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. In 2025, he organized with Gregor Meinecke and Vera-Simone Schulz the international conference "Pseudo-scripts. (Il)legibility & Ornamentation" at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in international journals, such as the "Burlington Magazine", "Source", the "Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz", and the "Sculpture Journal".

Silvio Pons

Silvio Pons is Full Professor of Contemporary History at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. He is President of the Gramsci Foundation, Rome. He has been a visiting scholar to several institutions, particulary Columbia University, the European University Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Wilson Center, the Russian Academy of Sciences. His main research interests are focused on the international history of the 20th century, on Soviet and world communism, on the Cold War and its aftermath. He is the author of The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism (Oxford University Press 2014) and the General Editor of the Cambridge History of Communism (Cambridge University Press 2017). His most recent book is The Rise and Fall of the Italian Communist Party. A Transnational History (Stanford University Press 2024).

Serena Rovai

Serena Rovai is director of the luxury programs and chair of the BRaND Luxury lab at the Excelia Business school (Paris, Tour, La Rochelle, France) and Adjunct Professor at IULM University, Milan. She is also Visiting Professor in other international academic institutions as ISCTE Lisbon, EM Lyon, Grenoble Ecole de Management, France, Tongji University China. Previously, she was director of Uni-Italia Center at the Italian Embassy in Beijing and professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management. Her research interests focus on the role of heritage in creative industries – with a specific focus on fashion – and sustainability. She regularly publishes in top tier international journals such as Psychology and Marketing, Regional Studies, Journal of Global Advertising amongst others.

Eike Schmidt

Eike Schmidt holds a Ph. D. in art history from Heidelberg University. After a curatorial career in the United States — at the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art — and an interlude as head of European Sculpture and Works of Art at Sotheby’s in London, he was appointed the first foreign-born Director of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence in 2015, where he oversaw major building renovations, an administrative reform and several international research projects and exhibitions. Since 2024, he is the Director of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. Alongside his curatorial and management responsibilities, he has continued to actively pursue his research interests, authoring more than 200 books and scholarly articles, and curating numerous exhibitions of both historical and contemporary art. Among his principal distinctions are the Excellency Award from the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture in New York (2017) and, in the same year, his appointment as Honorary Professor of Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Fabrizio Tassinari

Fabrizio Tassinari is the founding Executive Director of the EUI's School of Transnational Governance, where he oversees the School's strategic direction, design, and policy program. He is a political scientist specializing in democracy, governance, and international security in and around Europe. His research and writing have been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and featured in major international media outlets, including "The Economist", "Financial Times", "The Washington Post", "CNN", "Le Figaro", and "Die Welt", and he is the author of "Why Europe Fears Its Neighbors and The Pursuit of Governance: Nordic Dispatches on a New Middle Way". He has served in numerous advisory roles across Europe and North America and currently serves on the Council of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the boards of the Italian Institute of International Affairs (IAI), and the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF).

Lorenzo Vigotti

Lorenzo Vigotti is an architect and architectural historian specializing in medieval and early modern architecture. He received his M.Arch. from the University of Florence and his Ph.D. in architectural history from Columbia University. He collaborates on international research projects with the University of Chicago, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. His recent research has focused on domestic architecture in Florence, including Stanford’s Palazzo Capponi, as well as the transfer of architectural knowledge between Florence and the Low Countries and between Italy and Iran. His research and publications have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Kress Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Council of Europe, and the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. He has taught courses on the history of architecture and urbanism at Columbia University, New York University, Stanford University in Florence, Pratt Institute, the University of Utah, Union College, and the University of Bologna.

Domizia Weber

Domizia Weber earned her PhD from the University of Florence, defending a dissertation on witch- hunting in sixteenth-century Italy. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral research fellow (assegnista di ricerca) at the University of Florence’s Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine (2013–14), where her research focused on therapeutic magic and medicine, investigating the relationships between female healers and physicians in sixteenth-century Florence. In 2017, she received a diploma in Archival Studies from the Vatican School of Palaeography, Diplomatics and Archives, while concurrently conducting research at the Vatican Secret Archives on the links between mental illness and alleged demonic possession. Over the course of her career, she has taught History of Medicine at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan (2012), Early Modern Gender History at the University of Siena (2016), and History of Medicine at ISI Florence (2022). Currently, she contributes to the digital history project "ereticopedia.org" and teaches at upper secondary schools in Florence. Her monographs focus on witchcraft in Italy, with a particular emphasis on Florence and Modena, while her collaborative volumes explore themes such as heresy, religious history, and the Reformation in Italy.