Erminia Ardissino is presently Ricercatore confermato in Letteratura Italiana at the Università di Torino, Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione. She obtained a Masters Degree in Romance Languages at the University of Georgia in Athens, a Ph.D. at Yale University, and the Dottorato di Ricerca in Italianistica-Letteratura Umanistica at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. She has had several essays published on Dante, Petrarch, Humanism, Tasso, Baroque Italian Literature, Manzoni, etc., in the most important journals in the philological and literary field. She has worked for the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, and she is on the editorial board of Testo. She has published two volumes on Torquato Tasso: "L’aspra tragedia". Poesia e sacro in Torquato Tasso (Florence, Olschki, 1996) and Tasso, Plotino, Ficino. In margine a un postillato (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003); a volume on baroque sacred oratory: Il Barocco e il sacro. La predicazione del teatino Paolo Aresi tra letteratura, immagini e scienza (Vatican City, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001), and a book on seventeenth century Italian literature (Il Seicento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005). She has prepared the critical edition of the Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare di Giovanni di Bonsignori da Città di Castello and of the Operetta by Angelo Galli (both came out at the Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, Bologna, 2001 and 2006). She also edited Poemi biblici del Seicento (Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2005), the Trattato delle acutezze di Matteo Peregrini (Turin, RES, 1997), and a selection of Galileo’s letters (with commentary; Rome, Carocci, 2008). Together with Sabrina Stroppa she has written Leggere testi letterari (Milano, Bruno Mondadori-Paravia, 2001). She has organized two conferences on Dante: Dialoghi con Dante. Riscritture e ricodificazioni della Commedia (2004) and Etica e teologia nella "Commedia" (2006; the first proceedings came out in 2007, the second are in print). She has just finished an essay on the liturgical aspects of Dante’s Commedia.

Vittorio Enrico Avvedimento is professor of General Pathology at the Medical School of University "Federico II," Napoli. He received his MD degree at the University of Napoli and completed a residency in Neurology at the School of Neurology of the same University. He spent 2 years, 1978-80, in the laboratory of Molecular Biology, at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in Bethesda. In 1987 he was awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship, ACS. In 2002 he spent the year at the Institute of Cancer Research, Columbia University, as "L. Schaffner" fellow. He is currently coordinator of the PhD program in Molecular Pathology at the University "Federico II," Napoli. This program was ranked in 2007 first among the 120 PhD programs of the University by an independent panel of reviewers.
Avvedimento has been directly involved in the cloning of the first prototypic collagen gene (Cell, 1980, 21, 689-696; Cell, 22, 887-892) and thyroglobulin gene (PNAS, 1986 83, 323-327). By using these molecular tools he dissected a prevalent phenotype in epithelial tumors: the loss of differentiation memory of mammalian cells during neoplastic transformation. The experiments in transformed thyroid cells revealed some general mechanisms governing the transmission of signals by two main transducers, cAMP and Ras. Although these signals were involved in multiple phenotypes, the mechanisms by which they regulated growth and differentiation in mammalian cells were still obscure.
The relevant discoveries can be summarized as follows: 1. Oscillations of the cAMP drive the mitosis in fertilized Xenopus eggs (Science, 1996, 271, 1718-1722). 2. The localization and the type of transducer regulate the timing and the intensity of cAMP nuclear signaling. Neoplastic transformation (Ras) represses differentiation memory by altering the localization of cAMP kinase, PKA (Gen. Dev. 1991, 5, 22-28; 1992, 6, 1621; J.Biol.Chem. 1996, 271, 25350-25359). 3. Somatic mutations of TSH receptor gene drive thyroid hyperfunctioning adenomas (J.Clin. End. Metab., 1994, 79, 657-661).
The information and the tools generated by these discoveries were translated in vivo by inactivating or stimulating specific genes encoding the regulators of these transducers (Ras or cAMP) in several animal models of human diseases--so called somatic gene therapy (Nature Medicine, 1995, 1, 541-545; see also comments and News & Views in the same issue or in Nature, 1995, 375, 433; Nature Medicine, 1996, 2, 634-635; Nature Medicine 1997, 3, 775-779).
In the last 5 years Avvedimento has been focusing his attention on the basic mechanism(s) underlying human diseases. Progressively, during this period, several basic scientific issues, independently approached, are converging on a more comprehensive evolutionary vision. Aging and illness in humans represent a successful compromise between preserving genome stability versus oxidation-driven cellular processes. Oxidation, the basic energy-producing process, is costly, since it continuously attacks DNA and jeopardizes genome stability (New Engl. J. Med (2006) 354 (25): 2667-76). Recent data from the laboratory show that DNA damage and faithful repair are marked by an epigenetic scar (methylation) that silences the surrounding gene(s). This scar, by silencing damaged and repaired genes, represents a powerful evolutionary force, since it preserves the genetic information and reduces further damage to the genome (PLoSGenet. 2007 vol. 3, pp. 1144-1162). At the same time, other data from the lab indicate that oxidation, selective DNA damage and repair drive the basic transcription machinery used by sex hormones (Science 2008 Jan 11;319 (5860): 202-6). How can these two aspects of the same process (genome stability and oxidation) be reconciled? Senescence and diseases may directly derive from the imbalance of oxidation and silencing on gene expression.
While at Columbia, in collaboration with Max E. Gottesman, he will try to answer some of these questions by tracking down some relevant players linking DNA damage to gene silencing and repair.

Jérémie Barthas took his Ph.D. at the European University Institute ( Florence ) in 2006, with a dissertation on Machiavelli’s concept of people in arms and the Florentine public debt. He was associate researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) from 2005 to 2007, and Florence Gould Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa i Tatti, Florence) in 2007-2008.

His research fields include: the modern history of Italy and France (15th-18th centuries); the history of political thought; the history of financial culture, particularly in Italy ; the origins of political economy; and the social and financial history of the republic of the Great Council (1494-1512).

Recently, he edited and contributed to Della tirannia; Machiavelli con Bartolo, (Firenze: Olschki, 2007) and published Machiavelli e i libertini fiorentini; col ‘Sermone sopra l'elezione del Gonfaloniere’ del libertino Pier Filippo Pandolfini (1528), in Rivista Storica Italiana, 2 2008. He wrote an essay, Machiavelli in political thought from the age of revolutions to the present, to be published in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, edited by J. Najemy.

While at the Italian Academy he will complete the manuscript of his book on Machiavelli’s argument that “money is not the sinew of war.” He will also proceed with new research aiming to investigate what Antoine de Montchrestien means when, in his Traité de l’œconomie politique (1615), he invites the reader to consider Italian history in order to understand the danger represented by “the artifices and inventions of the gens de finances.”

Michele Battini is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Pisa. He has been a post graduate student and a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, then Charge and Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pisa. He has been a research fellow or delivered lectures at, among other institutions, the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis of Amsterdam, the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris, the Université de Marseille - Aix en Provence, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of: L'Ordine della Gerarchia. I contributi reazionari e progressisti alle crisi della democrazia in Francia 1789-1914 (Turin, 1995); Guerra ai civili. Occupazione Tedesca e Politica del Massacro - Toscana 1944 (Venice, 1997); and “Rhetorics of Hierarchy: On Linguistic and Ideological Premises of Totalitarian Fascism” in S. Avineri and Z. Sternhell’s Europe’s Century of Discontent (Jerusalem, 2003). His most recent book is The Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics (New York, 2007).

Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi specializes in Comparative Renaissance literature; her particular interests lie in book history, early modern drama, and women’s cultural production from 1450-1650. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003, with a dissertation on the typography of the early modern printed play. From 2004 to 2007, she was a Haarlow-Cotsen Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University and an Associate Fellow in 2007-2008. She is currently Assistant Professor of Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Her research explores the ways in which visual media, specifically letterforms and ink, were used to constitute and express national, corporeal, racial, and other forms of identity on the Renaissance page--Black’ or ‘Gothic’ lettering as pan-Germanic affiliation, Roman Capitals as stone epigraphy, rubrication (red ink) as simulated blood. Her most recent publications include essays on “counterfeit” Italian play texts and on Milton’s sanguineous Eikonoklastes forthcoming in Renaissance Drama (2009) and The Book in History, the Book as History (2010).

At the Italian Academy, she will be investigating the wide range of graphic technologies, from painted inscriptions to lettered samplers to printed colophons, which advertise Renaissance women as manual makers of letters. In some cases, these writing systems function as a demonstration of alphabetical literacy, in others as a manifestation of physical and pedagogical self-mastery, in yet others as proof of participation in changing textual markets. A de facto ut pittura poesis results from their combined presence, in which the literary and artistic theories of Alberti, Dolce, and Puttenham, among others, confront the difference of gendered production. Earlier stages of the project appeared as “’you sow, Ile read’: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers” (Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 2007) and “Alphabetical Positions: Engendering Letters in Early Modern Europe” (Critical Survey, 14.1, 2002).

Walter Cupperi (1976) was educated at the University of Pisa (MA in Humanities) and at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (diploma di licenza and PhD in History of Art). He received research fellowships from the American Academy in Rome (Italian Fulbright Fellow), the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (assegno di ricerca), the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome), as well as several scholarships and grants around Europe (Warburg Institute, London; Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Ministère de la Communauté Française, Brussels; Società Numismatica Italiana, Milan).

His areas of special interest include the history of sculpture and metalworks from the 11th to 16th century, portraits in sculptural media, and specific aspects of the classical tradition in the visual arts (re-use, plaster and bronze casts after the antique, collections of antiquities, the history of numismatics, and sarcophagi and burial typologies). Together with Salvatore Settis, he also co-edited a volume of F.C. Panini’s Mirabilia Italiae series, Palazzo Schifanoia a Ferrara, Modena 2007.

He is currently working on numerous projects concerning cultural exchanges among the Habsburg dominions in Europe, a topic to which he also dedicated his PhD dissertation, Le medaglie nella Milano asburgica (1535-1571): artisti, committenti e fortuna europea.

His most recent publications are Autorisierte Herrscherbildnisse des Leone Leoni: die Bronzebüsten Karls V. in Madrid, Wien und Windsor Castle, in Drei Fürstenbildnisse: Meisterwerke der Repraesentatio Maiestatis der Renaissance, exhibition cat., Dresden, Grünes Gewölbe, April, 10th 2008 - June, 9th 2008, ed. by M. Minning, Dresden 2008, pp. 27-38, and Il busto di Alfonso II d’Avalos ed altre opere di Annibale Fontana, in “Prospettiva”, 125, 2007, pp. 38-52, concerning the authorship of a bronze bust now at the Morgan Library, New York.

Ferdinando Fiumara received his M.D. (2000) and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience (2005) from the University of Torino. He has continued his postdoctoral studies as an associate scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University and he is currently Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University of Torino. His doctoral and postdoctoral research has been focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the formation and plasticity of synaptic connections between neurons. In particular, he has studied the role of synapsins, a family of synaptic vesicle-associated proteins, and their phosphorylation by protein kinases in the regulation of neurotransmitter release and in the short-term plasticity of synapses. He has also studied the formation and the short-term plasticity of behaviorally relevant neuronal circuits reconstructed in vitro. Currently, he is developing the neuroelectronic interfacing of complex circuits with controlled morphology and predictable connectivity of individually identifiable invertebrate neurons in culture for long-term analyses of synaptic activity in neuronal networks. As a fellow of the Italian Academy he will conduct his research in the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University focusing on novel molecular mechanisms involved in the perpetuation of long-term plasticity and memory storage at the synaptic level through the action of prion-like proteins and persistently activated protein kinases.

Marco Formisano completed his undergraduate studies in Classics in Palermo (Italy) and in Paris (Université de Paris VII, Jussieu) and received his PhD from the University of Palermo. After graduating and before starting the doctorate, he was awarded a fellowship which allowed him to go to Berlin as a visiting student at the Freie Universität: this marked the beginning of a close connection with Germany that continues to this day. Since then he has won various grants that have allowed me to spend long periods of time in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg), in the US (Brown, Yale, NYU) and in the UK as a Frances Yates Fellow at Warburg Institute. Currently he has a position as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Cooperative Research Center (SFB) "Transformations of Antiquity" at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. His areas of interest are ancient technical writing; late antiquity; art of war; classical tradition in the Renaissance; martyrological literature (esp. Perpetua); panegyric; autobiography; literary theory; marginal texts. He published a monograph on late Roman technical literature ("Tecnica e scrittura", Rome 2001), an edition of Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris (Milan, 2003) and of the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Milan 2008) and is co-editor of a collection of papers with the title "Perpetua’s Passions. Pluridisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (with J. N. Bremmer, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009) and of another on "War in Words. Die Transformationen des Krieges von der Antike bis zur Frühneuzeit (with H. Böhme, De Gruyter Verlag, forthcoming 2009). Currently he is working on another monograph on the art of war in antiquity and in the Renaissance.

Stefano Gattei (1970) graduated in philosophy, summa cum laude, at the University of Milan in 2003, and was awarded a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol in 2004. Back to Italy, he received a bursary from the University of Padua and was post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pisa (2005-2008).

He has lectured widely both in Italy and abroad, and taught philosophy and history of science in Milan, Pisa and Vercelli, where he was temporary lecturer in 2005-2006. His main research areas comprise: philosophy of science in the twentieth century, methodology, the philosophy of Karl R. Popper and critical rationalism, Thomas S. Kuhn (with special reference to Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism), William Whewell, the dynamics of theory-change and conceptual-change, incommensurability, the theory of rationality; history of science, Johannes Kepler, history of astronomy and cosmology, history and philosophy of mathematics.

He authored a few books, as well as several articles and book contributions. His most recent publications include La rivoluzione incompiuta di Thomas Kuhn, Turin: UTET, 2007; Introduzione a Popper, Rome-Bari: Laterza 2008; and the forthcoming Thomas S. Kuhn’s ‘Linguistic Turn’ and the Legacy of Logical Positivism (Aldershot: Ashgate) and Rationality without Foundations (London-New York: Routledge). He has also edited Thomas S. Kuhn, Dogma contro critica: Mondi possibili nella storia della scienza, Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2000; Ripensando il razionalismo critico, special double issue of Nuova Civiltà delle Macchine, XX, 1-2, 2002; and The Kuhn Controversy, special double issue of Social Epistemology, 17, 2-3, 2003.

He is currently working on a Reader’s Guide to Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (to be published by Continuum Press, New York), as well as on a collection of Feyerabend’s papers in the philosophy of physics (Physics and Philosophy, under contract with Cambridge University Press, New York). He is also completing the critical edition and translation of Johannes Kepler, Strena seu De nive sexangula (1611). His research project at the Italian Academy further develops this research on Kepler, especially focusing on his mathematical works and methodology.

Mauro Grondona was born in Genoa, Italy, on September 15, 1972. He was trained in law at the University of Genoa and graduated in 1996. After a four year post-graduate scholarship from the University of Genoa, he received a PhD in Private Law from the University of Pisa (2005). He currently teaches Private Law at the University of Genoa (Faculty of Law).
He is author of two books (La clausola risolutiva espressa, 1998; L’ordine giuridico dei privati, 2008, forthcoming) and several papers on topics such as contract law, tort law, family law, interpretation of the law, and comparative law.
His main interests in his research work are the role and the power of the judge, and the history of legal ideas and their impact on society.
In his semester at the Italian Academy, he will work on the exemplary figure of Alexander Pekelis, a jurist and a legal philosopher who escaped from Russia in 1917, living first in Italy (where he taught Legal Theory at the University of Rome "La Sapienza") and then, due to the Fascist Racial Laws, in the USA, becoming, along the path of Legal Realism, a pioneer in the social research against the excesses of Legal Formalism.

Rita Lucarelli was born on the 23rd of August, 1972, in Ostuni, Italy. From 1992 to 1996 she studied at the University of Naples "L'Orientale," where she took her degree in Classical Languages and Egyptology with a thesis entitled "Chapter 178 of the Book of the Dead." From 1999 to 2003 she was attached to the Research School CNWS of Leiden University (the Netherlands) with a Ph.D. grant. Her Ph.D. thesis was published in 2006 as The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen. Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. Currently she has a post-doc position at the University of Bonn (Germany), supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and concerning research on demons in magical and funerary papyri of the Pharaonic period. Her areas of expertise include religion, magic and demonology in ancient Egypt.

Antonio Mantovani, MD, PhD, completed his medical training at Rome University and his psychiatry training at Siena University. Under the mentorship of Dr. Simone Rossi at Siena University, Dr. Mantovani received his PhD in Applied Neurological Sciences. His graduate work focused on neurophysiological correlates of psychiatric disorders. Under the mentorship of Dr. Sarah H. Lisanby, Director of the Division of Brain Stimulation and Therapeutic Modulation, as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University, he designed and performed open and sham-controlled trials of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) in the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Tourette Syndrome, Panic Disorder, Depersonalization Disorder, and Major Depression. He is an Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Psychiatry of Columbia University.

Marco Pagano is Professor of Economics at University of Naples Federico II, President of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and the European Economic Association (EEA). He holds a B.A. from Cambridge University (1981) and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT (1986), and taught at Bocconi University and the University of Salerno.
Together with Josef Zechner, he is managing editor of the Review of Finance, the journal of the European Finance Association. In 1997 he was awarded the BACOB European Prize for Economic and Financial Research, jointly with Ailsa Röell. He chairs the Scientific Committee of EuroMTS and is a member of the Research Board of Unicredit Group. In the past, he advised the Italian Treasury on the reform of security markets (1995-96), and was a member of the Treasury's privatisation committee (1997-2001) and of the EU Parliament advisory panel on financial services (2002-04).
Most of his research is in the area of financial economics, especially in the fields of stock market microstructure, banking and corporate finance. He has also done research in macroeconomics, especially on its interactions with financial markets. His publications have appeared in several journals, such as American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Review, and Economic Journal.

Vittorio Pellegrini received his PhD in physics from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1997. Currently he is a senior researcher at the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics (INFM) of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, where he coordinates the research line "Semiconductor nanostructures for nanoelectronics and spin-photonics."
His scientific interests are in nanoscience. In particular his experimental work currently focuses on the study of emergent states of interacting electrons in nanostructures by means of elastic and inelastic light scattering and magneto-transport. Systems of interest include two-dimensional electrons in semiconductor quantum heterostructures and graphene, few-electron states in quantum dots, and hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanostructures. Additional experimental activity is concerned with single-molecule imaging and with investigation of protein trafficking and interaction.
Vittorio Pellegrini is a member of the executive committee of NEST (National Enterprise for nanoScience and nanoTechnology) center at the Scuola Normale Superiore, member of the "List of Experts" of the Italian Ministry of University and Research, and editor of the international journal Solid State Communications. He teaches "physics of nanostructures" at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the Scuola Superiore in Catania. He served as chair of many international conferences and coordinated several national and international research projects.

Silvio Pons is Professor of East European History at Rome University "Tor Vergata" (Rome II). He is the author of Stalin and the Inevitable War 1936-41 (Frank Cass, London 2002) and recently of Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino, 2006). He is editor of the following volumes: The Cominform. Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949, Fondazione Feltrinelli, Annali, XXX (Milan, 1994); (with F. Gori), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943-53 (Macmillan, London 1996); (with A. Romano), Russia in the Age of Wars 1914-1945 (Feltrinelli, Milan, 2000); (with Federico Romero), Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War (Frank Cass, London 2005); (with Robert Service), Dizionario del comunismo, 2 vols. (Einaudi, Turin 2006-2007).
His main research interests are focused on the history of the Cold War. He is currently writing a book on the history of international Communism and working on a project about the political culture of Italian Communism in the last decades of its life.

Dominique Kirchner Reill specializes in Modern European history with particular emphases on the Nineteenth Century, regionalism, nationalism, Italy, and the Balkans, as well as cultural and intellectual history. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami in Florida.

During her time at the Italian Academy she will be working on finishing her manuscript with the tentative title "Nationalists against the nation: 19th century projects for a multinational Europe," based largely on her dissertation. The book examines a group of local activists living in mid-nineteenth-century Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia (part of current-day Croatia) who pushed for the formation of a multi-national Adriatic state system along the lines of Belgium and Switzerland. These multi-national activists regarded their project as realist, not utopian, arguing that in a trade-oriented maritime world where Italian, German, and Slavic dialects were used interchangeably, and residents adhered to either Catholic, Christian Orthodox, Jewish, or Protestant faiths, no one language or national identity could be promoted without provoking intolerance and bloodshed. An article based on this research has been published in the volume Different paths to the nation. Regional and national identities in Germany, Italy, and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1830-1870 (2007). Research for this project was conducted in Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia and was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, the German Marshall Research Fellowship, the Delmas Foundation Grant for Independent Research on Venetian History and Culture, and the Whiting Foundation Fellowship among others.

Professor Reill has also been an active member of Columbia University’s Institute for Social Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and NYU’s Remarque Institute. At the University of Miami, Professor Reill teaches courses on Nineteenth Century Europe and post-World War II Europe, Italy, and the Balkans.

Riccardo Viale obtained a degree in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Turin with a thesis on "The Logical Models of Schizophrenic Thought." Afterwards, at Oxford, he developed interests in epistemology and cognitive science and in particular in the cognitive theory of science. He is now full professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of Milano-Bicocca and of cognitive economics at the Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione di Roma. He is President of the Rosselli Foundation (Turin) and editor in chief of Mind & Society - Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences (Springer).

He has been a faculty member and a visiting fellow at various universities, among them Bocconi (Milan); Oxford; Fribourg; Aix-en-Provence; Rice (Houston); California (Santa Barbara); and Federal (Rio de Janeiro).

In the last twenty years his areas of interest and research have been: experimental epistemology (category based induction, probabilistic reasoning, vague predicates, causal reasoning, tacit knowledge, anthropological and developmental differences in cognition); philosophy of science (deductive reasoning and falsification, scientific methodological values and rationality, cognitive theory of science); methodology of social science (philosophy of mind of the social actor, cognitive foundation of social action, social rationality); social epistemology (truth and cognitive reliability, epistemological values in risk assessment, scientometrics and scientific governance); cognitive economics (biases in decision making, economic rationality and duality of mind, technological knowledge); research and innovation policy (technology transfer, university-industry relations, regional innovation systems, triple helix).

He has published several books and many articles in various journals, among them: Mind & Language, Memory and Cognition, Foundation of Science, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Critical Sociology, Mind & Society, Industrial and Corporate Change, Science and Public Policy.

His current research concerns the different cognitive styles between academic and industrial researchers and on how the diverse features of tacit knowledge shape the transfer of technology.

Megan K. Williams is a scholar of early modern European history, with emphases on sixteenth-century socio-economic, diplomatic and international legal history. Her work has focused on the lands and neighbors of Habsburg Central Europe, including Venice, Hungary, and the eastern Adriatic.

She recently defended her doctoral dissertation in history at Columbia University. Entitled "Dangerous Diplomacy and Dependable Kin: Transformations in Central European Statecraft, 1526-1540", her dissertation examined early modern conceptions of diplomatic mobility and immunity as well as the manner in which diplomacy conducted as a family enterprise helped early modern diplomats overcome challenges to their mobility and credibility. Although historians of Renaissance diplomacy have focused chiefly on the development of the resident embassy, her research used diplomatic correspondence and other archivally-preserved materials to argue for the importance of transit and mobility in early modern political communications, and particularly in the construction of secular norms of diplomatic immunity, nascent discourses of territorial sovereignty, and prevailing notions of European political community during the Italian Wars of the early sixteenth century and at the height of Habsburg and Ottoman imperial expansion.

Research for her dissertation was conducted at archives and libraries in Italy, the Vatican, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Belgium, and was supported by numerous grants and awards, including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (Italy, Austria, Hungary), the German Marshall Research Fellowship (Austria, Hungary), and the Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities.

Her fellowship at the Italian Academy focuses on the role of diplomatic networks -- and the mobility they facilitated -- in the transmission of culture, exploring a series of Italian or Italian-educated families engaged in early sixteenth-century anti-Habsburg or anti-Imperial diplomacy, such as the Casali family of Bologna and Rome, who are best-known for soliciting the annulment of English king Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, but who also acted as representatives of Hungarian king János I. Szapolyai for over a decade; or the Rorarii of Friulian Pordenone, whose most famous member and papal nuncio to Hungary, Girolamo, authored a 1548 treatise which was later incorporated into Cartesian debates on animal rationality. During her time at the Italian Academy, Megan will complete several articles which emerged out of her dissertation research and will work on revising her manuscript for publication.

Megan Williams has also been an active participant at Columbia University's interdisciplinary Institute for Social & Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), and has presented her research at a wide range of academic venues in the United States and in Europe. Her teaching experience includes courses on early modern Europe, 1450-1789, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern and Central Europe.