Dr Vittoria Feola

I am Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Padova. I earned my PhD in History from Cambridge University (2005). I have held postdctoral fellowships and lecturerships in Brussels (2005-08) and Vienna (2009-14). Between 2015 and 2017 I was Senior Visiting Research Associate at MEHRC, Oxford University, on a Gerda Henkel Stipendium. Previous visiting posts include the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and the University of California, Rome Center. Notions of mobility are crucial to my fields of enquiry in many ways. On the one hand I work on mobility, violence, and antiquarianism in early modern England. After publishing two books and several essays on the relationship of antiquarianism to science through the case study of the Oxford antiquary Elias Ashmole (1617-92), I am now researching the relation of violence to practices of collecting and perceptions of the past in England, 1570-1660. I’m looking at the ways in which things, which were primarily or exclusively
considered as religious, such as devotional images, relics, and religious texts, acquired new meanings among communities of antiquaries and scholars as a reaction or consequence of violent actions or threats to them. On the other hand, the mobility of Padua University alumni and their texts in vernacular translations interest me greatly. I particularly look at measurable ways to assess the impact of the mobility of Paduan medical works in seventeenth-century England.

I am the President of Scientiae, an international community of early modern intellectual historians working in innovative, multidisciplinary ways - scientiae.co.uk. I am on the editorial boards of two book series which reflect my interests, namely, the Scientiae series in the history of knowledge at Amsterdam University Press, as well as the History of Medicine book series for L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome.