Onderzoeksprojecten

The Guarda Archaeological Project (GAP project, 2023–2026) is an exciting research initiative that aims to illuminate the roles of sanctuaries, hillforts, and villages in the non-urban settlement organization of the Serra da Estrela mountains (Beira Interior, Portugal) from the Iron Age through the early Roman period and beyond.

Throughout world history, the occupation of new territories by settler communities has informed the formation of specific colonial regimes, combining territorial control, the imposition of legal authority, and the eradication of indigenous cultures.

The project “The impact of Roman imperialism in the West: settlement dynamics and rural organization in Iron Age and Roman Portugal” is a landscape archaeological and ancient historical study of the westernmost area that was conquered by ancient Rome and incorporated into the Roman empire (c. 3rd-1st centuries BCE).

The Tappino Area Archaeological Project aims to map and analyze ancient settlement patterns and dynamics in a small valley in Central-Southern Italy, in modern Molise (province of Campobasso). The first sites in the area date to the Bronze Age.

Workshop at KNIR (23-25 June 2022) and ensuing edited volume – together with Louis Verreth and Ruben Poelstra – to be published in the Brill series Euhormos: Greco-Roman Studies in Anchoring Innovation.

In recent years, with the generous support of an NWO Aspasia grant and several Leiden University grants I have developed a number of Digital Humanities initiatives, based on the conviction that they are instrumental in bringing scholars and resources from different disciplines together, and that our study of complex cultural processes could benefit from experimenting with new ways of visualization and publication.

This ongoing project focuses on the concepts of ‘resistance’ and ‘anti-fascism’ in contemporary literature and culture. I engage with novels on the partisan war published in Italy between 2000 and 2022 by combining literary analysis with cultural and memory studies in order to answer the questions.

Archaeologists have surveyed millions of hectares of the Mediterranean landscape using field-walking techniques (i.e. pedestrian survey) to document archaeological finds that have surfaced, for instance by ploughing or erosion.

Both ancient and modern viewers have portrayed Roman colonies as key-factors in the spread of the urban model and are sharply contrasted with the non-urban settlement organization that prevailed in the conquered native areas.

This book project investigates Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) as court artist to the Medici in Florence, focusing mainly on the organization of the projects he directed in the ducal palace, now called Palazzo Vecchio.

The end of colonial rule in non-Western countries determined a reconfiguration of the role of the Catholic Church in mission areas. This process had already started during the Second World War and was intertwined with the construction of a new geopolitical order after the conflict which resulted, among others, in the Cold War, the struggle against communism and the rise of nationalist movements.

This edited volume explores how cultural practices and objects such as museum exhibitions, world fairs, but also scientific knowledge, contributed in shaping both models of national Italian identity and those of “the others” (non-European peoples, colonial subjects, but also human remains).

During the Jubilee year of 1925, under Pope Pius XI, the first Vatican Missionary Exhibition was inaugurated. Following the success of international exhibitions and fairs held in European and American metropolises, the Catholic Church had decided to “put on display” its evangelising work in missions scattered all over the world – from Alaska to Ethiopia, from China to the Amazon, from India to Peru.