Directors
Nadia Cannata
Nadia Cannata (Dott Lettere, Sapienza, D.Phil., OXON) is Chair in Italian Philology and
Textual Studies at the Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali at Sapienza,
Rome. Post-Doctoral Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian
Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, and recipient of grants from the Leverhulme Trust Fund,
she taught at the Univeristies of Oxfor and Reading before her current position at Sapienza.
She has published on Renaissance linguistics, text transmission and cultural history of the
Italian and European Middle Ages and Renaissance. She co-curated the exhibition I libri che
hanno fatto l’Europa (Accademia dei Lincei, 2016) and co-edited its catalogue. She is the
editor with M.W.Gahtan and M.J-M Sönmez of Museums of Language and the Display of
Intangible Cultural Heritage (London-New York 2020), the first comprehensive publication
on language museums in the world. She directs the digital project EDV – Epigraphic
Database in the Italian Vernaculars (9th-15th c.).
Maia Wellington Gahtan
Maia Wellington Gahtan (B.A. History of Art; Linguistics; Ph.D. Renaissance Studies, Yale
University), formerly a curator at Walters Art Museum and Program Director of the M.A. in
Museum Studies at Marist-Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, is currently on the faculty of Kent
State University. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Andrew
Mellon Foundation and Villa I Tatti, sits on the editorial board of Arts (MDPI) and Voce del
museo (Edifir), and has written/edited a number of books in the field of museology, among
which Vasari’s Florence; Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum; Churches, Temples,
Mosques, Places of Worship or Museums?; Sacred Art and the Museum Exhibition; Museum
Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World; Monographic Exhibitions and the History of
Art; Collecting and Empires. An Historical and Global Perspective; Museums of Language
and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Margaret J-M Sönmez
Margaret J-M Sönmez (M.A. Oxon., PhD. Dunelm) is Emerita Assoc. Prof. of Western
Philologies at METU, Ankara. She teaches postgraduate courses at METU, and
undergraduate courses at Bilkent University in Ankara. Her research and publications lie in
the fields of English literature and English philology, historical sociolinguistics, and language
as intangible cultural heritage. Most recently she has Guest Edited and contributed to
Language Collectors of the Long Nineteenth Century, a special issue of Nineteenth Century
Prose (Spring/Fall 2024), and co-authored, with Fahime Serhatti, the paper “Narrative Time
and Moral Injury in Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress”