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”