Research & CV

Sex & Gender studies in roman Antiquity

Since the days of my Ph.D. research, I have been interested in the study of androcentric norms and patriarchal rules in ancient Mediterranean societies as well as in the role of institutions and mythical storytelling to legitimize and enforce top-down control over subordinates.

Understanding toxic masculinity in ancient Roman society and religion entails the study of psychological, cognitive, and neuroendocrine mechanisms behind both everyday interactions and the implementation of specific social policies. In particular, my research activity concerning the role of cognitive constraints, cultural elaborations, and religiously sanctioned normative schemata has led me to devise an inter-disciplinary approach in which poststructuralist insights are used alongside cognitive and evolutionary tools within a deep-time approach.

Method & Theory in the study of religion(s)

The intertwined and complicated relationships between the comparative study of religion(s), science, and ideology have been a focal point of my personal interests since the early days of my academic cursus studiorum, and I continue to explore this path in my current research. In particular, I have investigated the history of the academic concept of shamanism, the cognitive biases and logical fallacies of the most important research programmes of the past, the diffusion of post-truth approaches and pseudoscience in the academic History of Religions, and the historical development of both contemporary Religious Studies and the Cognitive Science of Religion.

Critical reflection on method and theory is necessary for a good, epistemically-warranted research, and a swiss-army knife approach is a fundamental requisite. My qualitative research method involves the use and knowledge of different analytical techniques, such as philosophy of science, prosopography, longue durée historiographical frameworks, neurocognitive sciences, social network theory, cultural anthropology, and neurohistory. I am always keen to explore the cross-disciplinary integration and pollination of different fields (e.g., cultural geography, epidemiology and immunology of cultural representations, evolutionary psychology, and more traditional archaeological and anthropological methods).

Cognitive Historiography

The third millennium has witnessed the boom of mind and brain research. Cognitive (neuro)Science and Philosophy of Mind have become mandatory to understand the mental machinery of Homo sapiens. Meanwhile, history is increasingly seen as the indispensable connective tissue between Humanities, Social sciences, and Natural Sciences. The field of Cognitive Historiography is at the cutting-edge of this interdisciplinary, historical, and historiographical crossroad.

A renewed qualitative study of history strengthened by the understanding that the human brain is encultured and that human cultures are extended and time-limited neural environments, can help avoid the capital sins of historiography, that is, presentism, teleology, the confusion between emic and etic approaches, and the postmodernist fallacy (according to which epistemology equals ontology).

My personal goal is to push the envelope as much as possible in order to advance and support a consilient integration of the most useful humanistic tools and poststructural criticism with evolutionary and cognitive approaches so that they may not just coexist but reinvigorate each other within a coherent social-scientific framework to study human socio-cultural technologies and interactions.