My main academic interests are in the Philosophy and History of Science. I'm currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bielefeld University, where I'm developing a research project on the performative dimension of medical practice, education and communication, and its relation to medical knowledge.
Before this, I studied Philosophy at the University of Milan and at the Central European University in Budapest, where I obtained my PhD in 2020. In my PhD dissertation, I have argued that certain elements of scientific practice are ‘constitutive’ in coordination. This means that some elements provide certain conditions for applying abstract representations to concrete phenomena in certain scientific contexts. In other words, these elements function as provisional ‘anchors’ that are assumed at different stages of a coordination process, so that a stable condition of justification can be obtained. In the light of my examples from the history of the physical and biological sciences, I suggest that there are at least three qualitatively different kinds of constitutive elements: domain-specific theoretical principles, material elements, and domain-general assumptions underlying reasoning abilities.
In 2017-18, I was a DAAD-funded Visiting Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the LMU Munich, where I also conducted archival research on Georg Ohm's laboratory notes at the Deutsches Museum. In 2020-21, I was a Swiss Government Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Geneva, where I worked on the relationship between nineteenth-century craniological measurement and views of intelligence. From 2022 to 2024, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin (Research Group: "Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences”), where I worked on how “proto-validation” practices were deployed before the emergence of methodological discussions of validity, particularly in the psychophysical research of Gustav Theodor Fechner.
In addition to this, I have worked with Matteo De Benedetto (Ruhr Universität Bochum) on developing an evolutionary perspective on values in science inspired by biological niche construction. My academic interests also include topics related to evolutionary biology, the concept of human nature, social anthropology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, especially neo-Kantianism and logical empiricism.
On top of my academic interests, I keep developing my activities as a theatre practitioner, researcher and instructor. My artistic research focuses on theatre practice and pedagogy as tools to explore the connections between (scientific) knowledge, ritual, and society from an embodied perspective. Since 2021, I have been conducting several theatre workshops that take inspiration from the scientific imagery. In 2022, I have developed my first solo performance inspired by my philosophy research. In the spirit of integration, I believe it is crucial to invent and foster new forms of engagement between science, philosophy and society. These include novel teaching formats and creative interactions with the public sphere with pedagogical, social, and self-reflecting purposes, particularly by using powerful alternative tools as theatre laboratories.
