Research Team

 

Laura Caretti, Scientific Committee -  is Professor of History of Theatre and the Performing Arts at the University of Siena. She is Director of the PhD programme on "Comparative Studies: literature, theatre, cinema" and co-director of "Synapsis", European School for Comparative Studies. She taught Italian Literature at the Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh, and English Literature at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' She is also life member of Clare Hall College (Cambridge). She collaborates with many major Italian theatre companies and institutions and has promoted festivals of women's plays and films. As a member the International Ibsen Committee, she has organized and participated in many Ibsen conferences. She has written mainly on Shakespeare in performance and on modern and contemporary theatre (Ibsen, Pirandello, Eleonora Duse, Gordon Craig, Beckett, the Living Theatre, Stoppard), focusing on the art of actors and directors, on adaptations, on the interaction between theatre and cinema.

Andrej Kurnik, Scientific Committee - is assistant Professor of Politics of Migration at the University of Ljubljana.

Tommaso Sbriccoli, Scientific Coordinator -  is a political and legal anthropologist. He has been doing field research in Northern India since 2003, working mainly on rural and pastoral communities in Rajasthan for his MA and Ph.D thesis. His main fields of interest have been those related to institutions and traditional justice. He has thus focused his attention on the the relations between traditional legal systems – understood in a broad sense so to include, for example, possession rituals within legal field as instances of seeking justice on the side of marginal categories of people – state law, institutions, and conceptions about person. He has recently started a fieldwork research in Italy on refugees and the Italian process of claiming asylum, developing together with Stefano Jacoviello, a semiotician, an interdisciplinary methodological framework of text and discourse analysis, whose result has been published.
He is presently researcher at the University of Siena and participates to various International research projects.

 Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Scientific Tutor – is a philosopher with a focus on arts, multiculturalism and cross cultural dynamics. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre for Cross Cultural Studies at the Australian National University, and in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, where she is currently a lecturer in Communications for the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. She has published widely on indigenous arts, the ethics of appropriation arts, and the ethics of archaeology and anthropology. She is author of Aboriginal Art, Identity and Appropriation, (2005), and has co-edited (with Kevin White and Marie-Suzette Fernandes Dias) Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society (2006), Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts (2008); Medicine, Religion, and the Body (2009), and Tolerance, Education and the Culrriculum (forthcoming, 2010).
Susana Araújo is a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC, University of Lisbon). She taught and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex (UK) where she completed her PhD. She has an MA with Distinction from University of Warwick and first degree (1st class Hons) from the University of Lisbon. Her current project CILM (City and Insecurity in Literature and the Media) was recently approved for funding by FCT, following evaluation by international juri: it is concerned with the way anxieties about security are constructed and experienced in the urban space and has direct repercussions in the way we deal with issues such as migration and social exclusion. She edited a special issue of Review of International American Studies on the subject of “Terror and Security” (2008/2009) she co-edited the book TransAmerican, TransOceanic, Translation: Issues in American Studies (2010). Her articles appear in recognized journals such as Atlantic Studies, Symbiosis, Studies in the Novel, Women's Studies and she has a number of chapters published in books.

Kristian Van Haesendonck is researcher in comparative Latin American and Caribbean literatures in the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) at the University of Lisbon, where he teaches courses on Postcolonial theory and literature. Previously, he taught Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture in the United States (Princeton, Villanova). He graduated in Romance Languages from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) and obtained his PhD in Latin American Literature from Leiden University (The Netherlands). He is the author of the book ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Frankfurt-Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2008), a comparative study of contemporary Puerto Rican novels. He organized the 2009 International Conference Going Caribbean. New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art at the University of Lisbon. He has published articles and book chapters on Caribbean culture and literature and is preparing the publication two volumes on comparative Caribbean literature (one in English, co-edited with Theo D´haen, to be published by Rodopi; a second, multilingual, volume will be published by Humus Editores).

Eva Dinis is currently participating in the international “Playing Identities” project as a scholarship researcher in the Centre for Comparative Studies in Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (PT). She graduated from Universidade Nova de Lisboa with a degree in Portuguese and English Language and Literature, with a Minor in Translation Studies.  During that time she participated in the Erasmus Programme, and attended King’s College London (UK) for a year. She has recently completed her MA in Universidade de Lisboa, in the area of Portuguese Language and Culture, both with first-class honours. Her MA thesis focuses on the subjects of migration, identity, alterity and creolisation, and how they apply in two works of Lusophone literature, by Eça de Queirós and José Eduardo Agualusa. Her main areas of interest are Lusophone and Anglophone Literature, as well as Cultural and Identity Studies.

Stefano Jacoviello - Scientific Tutor - is post-doc fellow in Semiotics at the Istituto Superiore di Scienze Umane (Florence), and Lecturer at the Università di Siena (Italy). His research interests interlace anthropology and theory of arts, in order to develop a theorethical approach to cultural objects based on structural semiotics text analysis.

Francesca Montanino graduated in 2008 in Theatre and Performance at “La Sapienza”- University of Rome”. She is currently attending  her third Year as Phd Student in Comparative Literature (Letteratura, Teatro e Cinema) at University of Siena. Her dissertation will be focused on Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” in its contemporary rewritings and performances. In the last years she worked  as  Assistant Director, Dramaturg and Actress in several Italian productions. She edited two books on Theatre Direction in Contemporary Italian Theatre. Her research interests include Twentieth Century Italian and European Theatre, the relations between text and performance, Shakespeare in performance.

Nicola Perugini is PhD in political anthropology at the University of Siena. His work (2005-2009) focused on land rights, territorial practices and historical dynamics of reproduction of power and traditional dependence relations in a pastoral area of the Moroccan Middle Atlas. He taught “Anthropology of the Mediterranean” and “Politics in the Middle East” at the American University of Rome (2008-2009). His research is currently exploring the relations between settler colonialism, law and spatial practices in Palestine, with a specific focus on both the notion and practices of colonial frontier (in collaboration with the Decolonizing Architecture Institute) and on the Israeli settlers’ use of the human rights discourse and its legal techniques. Nicola Perugini is currently affiliated, as an independent researcher, to Muwatin-The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy. He translated and edited “Il male minore” (2009) and co-edited “Pianificare l’ oppressione” (2010). His articles have been published in international journals such as International Political Anthropology and the Journal of Law and Social Research. He has a  number of articles published in Italian. 

Michele Campanini obtained his Bachelor of Modern Literature, Music and Show Business at the University of Siena, at the same University he received a PhD in Comparative Studies: literature, theatre, cinema. He was in Denmark (Aarhus), Northern Ireland (Derry) and Canada (Toronto and Halifax) for research periods. He is a teacher of Italian Literature in high schools as well as contract professor of Italian language for foreign PhD students at Santa Chiara, Postgraduate Studies Centre at the University of Siena. As a curator of cultural events he worked as artistic director and organizer for Italian and foreigner institutions. Over the course of the last few years his research field is travel literature and migration, and he published essays and articles in Italy and Canada. He has just published (2010) the book Emigration accounts and renderings of Ocean Crossings. Memories, stories, voices (in Italian) with the Foundation Paolo Cresci for the History of Italian Migration.

Angelo Romagnoli is professional actor. With a B.Hons cum Laude in Philosophy and a M.Sc. in Economics, he is currently a PhD candidate in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Siena, researching into the revision of mainstream acting theories according to the latest findings of neurosciences, and into the notion of agency in economics.
He is amongst the developers of the project Playing Identities in which serves as Artistic and Scientific Advisor.
He is also Junior Member of the Centro Studi Sistemi Complessi (CSC) of the University of Siena since year 2003.
For his artistic accomplishments, he has been awarded in 2009 with the Premio Vittorio Mezzogiorno.