From Dante to racism in Europe, from climate change to hybrid warfare, from the Mayan diet to the fertiliser industry in Porto Marghera. Ca' Foscari University of Venice confirms its appeal to young research talents by winning a total of 3.3 million euros in European funds for 14 "Marie Skłodowska-Curie" projects.
The research projects will be conducted by scholars of 6 different nationalities, almost all of which come from foreign research institutions (4 from the United Kingdom, 4 from France). Their two-year or three-year research projects will be carried out between Ca' Foscari and other universities or research centres located across the United States, Canada, South Korea, Ecuador and Switzerland.
Named after the first female Nobel laureate, the European Commission's "Marie Skłodowska-Curie" programme annually selects and funds the most promising talents in research by offering them the opportunity to develop their own scientific project in different institutions and countries. This edition of the prestigious European call has awarded 1,235 grants, selected from the 7,044 projects presented, for a total of 257 million euros.
These research grants are divided into Global (two years of research abroad and followed by one year at Ca' Foscari) and European Fellowships (two years of research at Ca' Foscari). Thanks to the university's attention to these competitive international funding schemes, the Ca’ Foscari community of "Marie Skłodowska-Curie" fellows has significantly grown, reaching a number of 158 researchers.
Ca' Foscari has been a trailblazer in Italy regarding the career opportunities of Marie Curie fellows. Thanks to initiatives such as the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and the “Young Researchers” ministerial programme, "Marie Curie" candidates who were rated as excellent but couldn’t be funded by the European Commission, can still be recruited by universities as fixed-term researchers.
The Global Fellowships
Italian researcher Ilaria Sicari will spend the next two years at Stanford before concluding her research in Venice. Her project will focus on the intense cultural traffic through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
Iranian researcher Maryam Aslany comes from the University of Oxford and will spend two years at Yale University. She will study the social and economic models of adaptation to climate change, especially in rural India.
Mattia Brancato will conduct research on science teaching in the colonial era. The focus will be on the instrumental use of culture by the Europeans, by way of Jesuit Missions. He will spend two years at the prestigious Harvard University to complete his fellowship.
In partnership with the University of Notre Dame, United States, Giovanna Corazza will investigate the role of geography and cartography in Dante's Comedy.
Lorenzo Feltrin will tackle the diffusion and concentration of phosphates in the lagoon. He will particularly focus on one of the most important industrial plants in Europe, the Porto Marghera industrial complex. The fellowship is in collaboration with the Geneva Graduate Institute.
With an experience at the NATO Maritime Studies and Experimentation Center under his belt, Maurizio Geri will study possible NATO and EU common strategies to fight against the Russian hybrid war, in the "energy-resources-climate" security link, taking into account the role of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (ETDs).
Samuele Mazzolini, an Italian-Ecuadorian researcher from the University of Calabria, will deal with populism and institutions in Latin America, comparing the cases of Ecuador and Argentina and working at the University of Ecuador.
Enrico Emanuele Prodi comes from UCL. He will spend his Global Fellowship between Harvard and Ca' Foscari. The Italian researcher will compile a critical edition of the work on Greek dialects by Gregory of Corinth, a 12th-century Byzantine grammarian.
After doing research at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina, the Spanish-Argentinian researcher Lorena Natalia Zorilla will study the origin of literary fictions on gender equality in the philosophical culture of the eighteenth century.
The European Fellowships
Chloè Berut, from France, has been awarded a European Fellowship to conduct in-depth research on the interconnections of healthcare systems in Europe. She will focus on the interoperability of information and digital systems.
Coming from the French CNRS and from the University of Paris 1, Clarissa Cagnato will use innovative molecular technologies to reconstruct the diets of the ancient Mayans who inhabited the lower, flatter region.
Armelle Le Herou will focus on pre-humanistic Greek philology. The aim of her research will be to demonstrate the existence of a vast knowledge and circulation of Greek texts in the mediaeval West, well before the age of Humanism, thus debunking a common myth.
Goran Petrovic, of Belgian and Serbian nationality, will address the identity dynamics of cultural racism in Europe. To do this, he will apply a psychoanalytic point of view to a political comparative study. Petrovic was previously employed at the University of Warwick.
Brazilian researcher Vilane Gonçalves Salez, from the University of Bern, will come to Ca' Foscari to study the impact of rising sea levels on the hospitality industry, using artificial intelligence.
