Role
Full Professor of Medieval History at the University of Messina.
Bio
She graduated in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Bari in 1990 and earned a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Florence in 1996. She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University, a fellow of the Accademia della Crusca, and a fellow of Villa I Tatti – Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Since 2000, she has been a researcher in Medieval History at the University of Genoa; in 2011, she moved to the University of Messina, where she has been a full professor since 2015. In 2025, she was the Cornerstones Visiting Chair in History at the University of Richmond (VA).
Her research focuses on the cultural history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with particular attention to the history of witchcraft , magic , women's history, travel and mobility between the West and the East, as well as aspects of social life such as cross-dressing. She has presented her research at international conferences and at various Italian cultural institutes.
From 2018 to 2022, she served on the scientific committee of the International Society for Cultural History. In 2022, her edited volume, Folklore, Magic, and Witchcraft: Cultural Exchanges from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, received the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Award; in 2023, she received the Premio Italia Medievale and the XXVII Premio Montursi Terme for On the Margins of the Middle Ages: A Cultural History of Otherness.