Philological and Literary, Historical and Cultural Studies
Doctoral Research Projects XLI CYCLE – A.A. 2025-2026
Project title: The Sardinian Eighteenth Century. The Life and Works of Vicente Bacallar y Sanna.
Abstract: The research project aims to study the figure and works of Vicente Bacallar y Sanna (1669 1726), Marquis of San Filippo. The three-year research plan is structured into several phases of study intended to deepen the understanding of the author’s cultural, literary, and political significance. Initially, an updated biography will be prepared; this will be followed by an analysis of the works of Vicente Bacallar y Sanna and the development of a critical study of selected texts. The latter will incorporate the results of various lines of inquiry, including the relationships – intratextual, intertextual, and transtextual – between his work and the different literary systems interacting in early modern Sardinia. The author’s multifaceted profile, encompassing the roles of diplomat, intellectual, and prolific writer, requires sustained scholarly effort capable of accounting for the complexity of this Sardinian poet and writer and his relationship with leading figures of the European cultural and political landscape in the early eighteenth century contexts.
PhD Student: Capra Federica
Supervisor: Prof. Paolo Caboni (Università di Sassari)
Co-Supervisor: Prof.ssa Giulia Murgia (Università di Cagliari)
Curriculum: Philological-literary and historical-cultural studies of the Modern and Contemporary Age
Project title: Indo-Iranian culture and Greek religion: comparative approaches to the study of Indo European Männerbünde.
Abstract: This thesis focuses on studying Indo-European Männerbünde, drawing a direct comparison of the relevant social institutions among the ancient Greeks and Indo-Iranians, through relevant textual sources. The focus will be placed on archaic and classical Greek texts, the Vedic corpus, and the Avesta. The aim is to better understand these institutions through the processes that formed them and gave shape to what we find in historical times. For this purpose, the most recent approaches from cultural anthropology, sociology, social ontology, and ritual theory and I will adopt several strategies such as lexicological analysis, close reading, comparative poetics...) will be used in the analysis of primary sources. Greater depth will be dedicated to the link between Männerbünde and sovereignty, in the form of sacred kingship, and the value of the traditional categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” to re-examine them in detail and reformulate them.
PhD Student: García Beni Rodrigo
Supervisor: Prof.ssa Tiziana Pontillo (Università di Cagliari)
Co-Supervisor: Prof. Frank Köhler (Universität Tübingen)
Curriculum: Philological-literary and historical-cultural studies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Project title: Cristina Campo: the unpublished letters and the book "Il libro delle ottanta poetesse".
Abstract:The project focuses on the study of Cristina Campo's correspondence and her anthology of women's poetry, Il libro delle ottanta poetesse, acknowledging the close relationship between friendship and literature, writing and life as perceived by the author. Particular attention will be given to her unpublished correspondence with Margherita Dalmati, Vittorio Sereni, Matizia Maroni Lumbroso, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Djuna Barnes. Through evidence from published and unpublished letters, writings scattered in magazines and anthologies, and thorough archival research, the aim is to reconstruct her anthology, Il libro delle ottanta poetesse. Vittoria Guerrini worked on this project with her friends Mario Luzi, Leone Traverso, Remo Fasani, Gabriella Bemporad and Raissa O. Naldi in the years of her youth in Florence (1951–1956). The book, a prelude to Cristina Campo's poetry, was never published; however, traces of it remain in the author's papers.
PhD Student: Lingeri Carlotta
Supervisor: Prof.ssa Stefania Lucamante (Università di Cagliari)
Co-Supervisor: Prof.ssa Monica Farnetti (Università di Cagliari), Prof.ssa Irene Palladini (Università di Cagliari)
Curriculum: Philological-literary and historical-cultural studies of the Modern and Contemporary Age
Project title: Domestic and public sociality in the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa
Abstract: The project aims to contribute to the broader overview of the earliest stages of Indo-Aryan societies in ancient India, by investigating the dimension of domestic and public sociality in the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa, a late Vedic text pertaining to the Sāmaveda tradition. The JB is rich in tales and myths, from which several hints to the social context can be extrapolated. The selected passages, translated anew, will provide textual evidence to understand how sociality was conceived in late Vedic times. Social institutions such as the family, the couple, marriage and parenthood will be addressed, keeping into account the impact of religion and culture on the broader community. An important part of the research will be dedicated to the third kāṇḍa, the least studied of the three books, that represents a rich source of new materials. Since most secondary literature on the matter focus on the first and the second book, the research intends to partially fill this gap in studies.
PhD Student: Manca Alessia
Supervisor: Prof.ssa Tiziana Pontillo (Università di Cagliari)
Co-Supervisor: Prof.ssa Marianna Ferrara (Università La Sapienza)
Curriculum: Philological-literary and historical-cultural studies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Project title: Buzzati and Camus: guilt, absurdity and existentialist fantasy.
Abstract: The project aims to compare the poetics of Dino Buzzati with those of Albert Camus, starting from certain similarities, such as Camus' adaptation of Buzzati's play Un caso clinico. In this way, not only will the hitherto neglected points of contact between Buzzati and the French writer, such as the concepts of absurdity and guilt, be established, but a new definition of Buzzati's fantasy will also be provided. The latter seems to be, in fact, a tool for conveying the great existential systems that characterise him, on a par with the philosophical inserts of the French existentialists. This study also aims to reconsider Buzzati's position in the Italian canon, placing him alongside, without paradox, the neorealists of the 1930s: like the latter, he takes up the traditional structures of the novel/short story, while absorbing the modernist lessons of the early 20th century (in his case rendered through the fantastic).
PhD Student: Pasini Alessandro
Supervisor: Prof.ssa Stefania Lucamante (Università di Cagliari)
Co-Supervisor: Prof. Fabio Vasarri (Università di Cagliari)
Curriculum: Philological-literary and historical-cultural studies of the Modern and Contemporary Age
Research project: Fragmenta comica adespota apud Plutarchum servata.
Abstract: This research project aims to provide a new critical edition, including translation, an extensive lemmatized commentary and metrical analysis, of the fragmenta comica adespota (or those presumed to be such) preserved within Plutarch’s Vitae Parallelae and Moralia. The study will examine the Plutarchean contexts in which these fragments are embedded, as well as the textual-critical and exegetical issues pertaining to the fragments themselves. Furthermore, insofar as the fragmentary evidence permits, the research will evaluate all attributions proposed in previous scholarship.
PhD Student: Tamburrano Gianluca
Supervisor: Prof. Jürgen Hammerstaedt (Università di Colonia)
Co-Supervisor: Prof. Felice Stama (Università di Cagliari)
Curriculum: Philological-literary and historical-cultural studies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages