Giacomo Santoro

Giacomo Santoro is a third-year PhD student in History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. The title of his research is Francesco Patrizi from Siena. Theory, cultural networks and political practices in fifteenth-century Italy.

He graduated in Modern Philology from the University of Catania in 2019, with a thesis in History titled: Government, Institutions and Culture in the Siena of Francesco Patrizi, and a bachelor in Humanities, historical curriculum, with a thesis titled: Freemasonry and the Ruling Classes in the Formation of the Italian Nation State.

Since 2019 he has been teaching assistant in Early Modern History at the University of Catania, Department of Humanities,  where he conducts workshops, lectures, seminars, tutoring, curricular and extracurricular activities.

He has edited, organized and spoken as a speaker at academic conferences, events and presentations of cultural interest in Italy and abroad.

He is editor of the volume “Politique d’abord! Gli editoriali di Giuseppe Giarrizzo per La Sicilia” (1984- 2015), Catania, DSE, 2019. Three articles in scholarly journals are forthcoming: one on an epistle of political identity in fifteenth-century Siena, one on the Aragonese in Terra di Lavoro between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and another on humanistic political erudition.

His interests are in the cultural and political history from early modern to modern age. His focus is mainly on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, according to a multidisciplinary approach studies on the Renaissance. His research moves between cultural, political and diplomatic history, philology, literature and philosophy. Lately, he has turned his analysis to the mutual relationship between theory and the practices of power in the Italian Renaissance.

He is a visiting researcher at Yale for Fall semester in 2023-2024. In the semester, he is also an instructor for elementary Italian 110 course at the Department of Italian Studies.