about me
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My academic profileI am a researcher specialized in Italian and Humanistic Philology, as well as Italian Medieval and Renaissance Literature, with a focus on Digital Humanities and Digital Publishing. My passion for Italian literature—especially Renaissance epistolography and the history of rhetoric—has shaped my academic and professional trajectory and continues to guide my work at the intersection of textual scholarship, manuscript culture, and digital methods.My academic background is marked by two doctoral degrees: the first awarded by the University of Liège in 2018, and the second by the University of Basilicata in 2022. At Liège, my research focused on the rhetorical strategies deployed by humanists in epistolary discourse and culminated in the dissertation Il vero “raccontato”. Narratio brevis e retorica umanistica nell’epistola tra Quattro e Cinquecento, which showed how epistolographers drew on the genres of the novella and the facetiae, renewing—within a humanist framework—the ideal of the sermo quotidianus prescribed for letters since antiquity. During these years I also contributed to the ARC EpistolART project (critical and digital edition of Giorgio Vasari’s correspondence) and undertook a collaborative stint at the University of Oxford as a Digital Fellow within the Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters/EMLO project (Sep–Dec 2016), experiences that consolidated my commitment to digital scholarly editing and research infrastructures.In my doctoral work at the University of Basilicata, I investigated the role of epistolary communication in shaping political language in the Italian signorie of the later Quattrocento. This research led to the critical edition of Bartolomeo Miniatore’s Formulario di esordi ed epistole missive e responsive per Giacomo Bolognini, a key work for understanding humanistic letter-writing and rhetorical training. The dissertation received a special mention at the Premio Letterario Basilicata (2022) and was subsequently published by Federico II University Press. I have also supervised the critical and digital edition of Miniatore’s Formulario di petitioni responsioni e repplicationi per Astorre II Manfredi, further strengthening my expertise in philological method, editorial theory, and digital publication workflows.My postdoctoral research began at the University of Liège as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the EpistolART project (Mar–May 2018), followed by a Research Fellowship on the ERC SkillNET project at Utrecht University (Dec 2019–Nov 2020). From Nov 2022 to Oct 2023 I held a postdoctoral position at the Casa delle Tecnologie Emergenti of Matera (University of Basilicata), where I focused on making primary sources for the history of Matera available online through TEI-XML and Linked Open Data, including the digitization of the Codice Diplomatico di Matera and the digital edition of Eustachio Verricelli’s Cronaca materials. I then joined the University of Naples Federico II as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Nov 2023–Oct 2024; and again Mar–Sep 2025), working on digital publication projects and documentary sources connected with the history and institutional culture of Naples, before moving to KU Leuven, where I have been a Research Associate since Oct 2025.My scholarship includes numerous peer-reviewed publications in Italian and English on authors and topics such as Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Giorgio Vasari, as well as on the history of the book, the history of rhetoric, and the digital editing and semantic enrichment of medieval documents. More broadly, my output comprises three books (two of them monographs), multiple digital critical editions and digitizations, and a substantial body of articles and book chapters; I have organized several international events and presented my research widely at conferences, often in English. Across these formats, my aim is consistently to combine rigorous philology with open, reusable digital scholarship.Within digital humanities, I develop and apply advanced, AI-assisted editorial workflows. My projects integrate automated and semi-automated XML-TEI encoding with Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Named Entity Disambiguation (NED), followed by expert validation, to produce consistent markup and richly linked semantic data at scale. These methods underpin a growing portfolio of digitalizations and datasets already published online, demonstrating how artificial intelligence can be integrated responsibly into philological practice while improving efficiency, interoperability, and discoverability.Teaching is also central to my academic identity. I have delivered university courses and teaching activities at the University of Liège, the University of Basilicata, Leiden University (Lecturer of Italian Literature, Feb–Jul 2024), and KU Leuven. Alongside university teaching, I have several years of experience teaching Italian as a second language in schools, and I consider language teaching one of the most rewarding ways to share Italian culture and connect research with wider communities.My experiences in Liège, Oxford, Utrecht, Leiden, Naples, Potenza, and Leuven have not only broadened my scholarly perspective, but also enabled me to contribute to the evolving field of digital humanities by bridging traditional humanistic inquiry with modern technologies for editing, publishing, and semantic enrichment.
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