Maria Vittoria COMACCHI

My research and teaching interests span the fifteenth and sixteenth century and lie in European and Mediterranean philosophy and intellectual history. I am committed to understanding the Renaissance as the result of interactions between different cultures and traditions in the Eurasian zone. In particular, I work on Neoplatonism, Jewish philosophy, Jewish-Christian intellectual relationships in Italy and Spain, the European perception of the Ottoman culture and the Arabic intellectual tradition, political theories, and geographical knowledge.

Currently, I am a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia and at the Department of History at the Indiana University Bloomington. My research project seeks to cast new light on the traveler and thinker Guillaume Postel and his religious and political universalism, focusing on his perception of the Ottoman society and culture, and the neglected Arabic sources he read.

In 2020-2021, I was a Max Weber Fellow at the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute, and in Fall 2021 a Max Weber Visiting Fellow. 

Before joining the EUI, in 2019-2020 I was a Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the Universität Hamburg and the recipient of the 2020 Kristeller-Popkin Travel Fellowship.

In 2019, I earned a PhD - Doctor Europaeus with Honours in History of Philosophy at the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia. My dissertation, supervised by Emanuela Scribano, sheds new light on Yehduah Abarbanel, aka Leone Ebreo, and his humanistic sources. During my PhD, I carried out my research at the Universität Hamburg, the Centre d'Études et de Recherche Moyen-Orient Méditerranée at the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, and the Laboratoire d'Études sur les Monothéismes at the CNRS.