Team

Jasenka Gudelj is a historian of art and architecture and a professor of the history of architecture. Her research focuses on the Adriatic region, exploring the circulation of artistic and architectural knowledge, its media and networks. She has investigated the notion of cultural transfer in the field of the classical tradition, reframing the geography of classical models that had a considerable impact on Renaissance art and architecture to include the eastern Adriatic coast. Moreover, her studies explore the Renaissance and Baroque artistic and architectural production of the coast, assessing its patronage within the socio-political frame. Her research also encompasses the construction of intrinsic proto-national cultural identities that found their expression in the visual arts and architecture, with an emphasis on Schiavoni/Illyrian confraternities and colleges in early modern Italy.

Silvia Bellacicco is an expert in European funding and Euro-planning, as well as in project management and implementation. She holds a degree in Marine Environmental Sciences (2000) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and has since 2001 worked on European funding for public bodies such as municipalities, research institutes/universities, as well as civil regions and private companies. She has extensive experience in project/partnership coordination and management, and in providing technical and financial assistance to project leaders and associates.

Laris Borić  is an art historian and presently an associate professor of art history at the University of Zadar, Croatia. His principal academic focus includes questions of architecture, urban transformation, and visual culture in the cities of the Adriatic rim during the early modern period. A particular point of interest is the transfer of ideas and visual concepts, as well as their dissemination and transformation in peripheral areas, mainly through the networking of commissioners, humanists, and artists. This is a process during which complex layers of collective and individual identities were often intermixed with various social, political, and cultural agents active in early modern Dalmatia, as part of the Venetian Stato da Mar.

Rebecca L. Johnson is a doctoral candidate at McGill University, working under the supervision of Dr Chriscinda Henry. Her dissertation focuses on the dynamic intersections between architectural space, bodily experience, and socio-political conditions surrounding the development of saintly shrines in Dalmatia. Primarily, she tracks the longue durée of sacred sites dedicated to St Simeon in Zadar. Her work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC). She is also supported by a Venetian Research Program grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Rebecca received her BA in Art History with a minor in French Studies (2016), and her MA in Art History and Visual Culture (2017) from the University of Guelph. In 2023, Rebecca was a research curatorial fellow at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). She has also written for galleries such as the MMFA and Art Mûr in Montréal. In November 2023, Rebecca joined the Department of Dr Tanja Michalsky at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, where she is currently a predoctoral research fellow. From January 2025, she has been a collaborator of the ERC AdriArchCult project with her research ‘Signalling Saintly Presence: Constructing Identity in Fourteenth- to Seventeenth-Century Dalmatia’.

A classical philologist, Neven Jovanović completed a traditional MA thesis in philology and a PhD thesis supported by digital methods at the University of Zagreb. His main research interests are European Neo-Latin literature, especially as related to modern Croatia, and digital philology. He teaches Latin literature and some Greek courses. His digital work centres on scholarly editions and analyses of Latin texts and textual corpora. He is the main editor of the digital collection “Croatiae auctores Latini” (CroALa), which publishes open-source texts of Croatian Latin writers from the 9th to the 20th centuries. His research interests lie in the exploration of Dalmatian and Croatian Renaissance humanism, and the publication of digital collections and editions of Dalmatian Renaissance literary production.

Ana Marinković is a medievalist and historian of art and architecture specialising in the urban history of the Adriatic. As Assistant Professor at the Art History Department at the University of Zagreb, she teaches courses related to architecture and urban planning, iconography and hagiography in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Her research interests lie in spatial responses to changes in political governing and ecclesiastical reforms, as well as in the strategies of symbolic representation of political and church hierarchies. Her research has focussed particularly on the civic appropriation and political use of local saints' cults, as well as ‘foreign’ – notably Venetian – rulers' interventions in the architectural and devotional practices of eastern Adriatic cities, with a focus on the interplay between private and civic commissions in ecclesiastical (semi-public) and public realms. She is currently working on the spatial issues that arose from the Observant reform and the Catholic Reformation, namely, on the enclosing/disclosing of liturgical space and on clausura in Mendicant and monastic communities in the eastern Adriatic.

Elvis Orbanić is an archivist and a historian. He works as a research associate at the Institute for Historical and Social Sciences of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Rijeka. His research focuses on the northern Adriatic region, especially Istria from the 16th century onwards. The main themes of his scholastic interest are related to publishing of historical sources and the relations of the Church and society in the early modern age. He has been a member of three scientific projects and is currently a member of the Scientific Center of Excellence for Croatian Glagolitic Studies.

Sarah Sharpe is a doctoral candidate at the Universities of Glasgow and St Andrews, researching the nature and extent of Tintoretto's visual citations from the work of Raphael. After obtaining an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, she continued her doctoral research on early modern artistic exchanges, with a particular focus on Venice. Her dissertation focuses on identifying concrete artistic and conceptual overlaps between the two artists, as well as the framework that fostered such an exchange in 16th-century Venice. The project examines the specific cultural, religious, and societal context of this region and period.
Further interests, within and beyond the doctoral project, include early modern print culture, idiomatic and material exchanges between Rome and Venice, as well as art theory—both early modern and contemporary – and reception studies. Imitation, emulation, and innovation within the arena of early modern painting are of particular interest.
Her research has been funded, from the onset, by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), as well as the University of Glasgow's College of Arts. Sarah has worked as a translator, copy-editor, and editor for over a decade and continues to, in addition to her own research, help shape and format the academic production of other scholars.

Petar Strunje is a historian of art and architecture holding a joint PhD degree (with the title Doctor Europaeus) from the Università IUAV di Venezia and the University of Zagreb (2022). His dissertation deals with commercial and residential spaces constructed for Muslims on Venetian territories, such as the Fondaco dei Turchi and the Scala di Spalato. He also studied at the University of Padua and Ghent University within the Erasmus programme. His research interests include public architecture and infrastructure, minority spaces, and intercultural (particularly Ottoman-Venetian) artistic exchanges in the early modern Adriatic basin. He is currently working on public architecture in early modern Venetian Dalmatia within the territorialisation paradigm.

Olha Zarechnyuk is a PhD student at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice (2025–2028). She obtained a BA (2012) and MA (2013) in architecture at Lviv Polytechnic National University and worked as a historian of architecture at the Center for Urban History. There, she researched individual buildings and their restorations as part of the Lviv Interactive Platform. Moreover, she studied the formation of modern heritage preservation institutions in the Habsburg Empire with a focus on eastern Galicia, exploring actors and their agencies, as well as the social, scientific, and political contexts of their preservation and restoration work. In her PhD project, she uses comparative methods to broaden this research to Habsburg Dalmatia and explores the common imperial heritage preservation system. Her work includes compiling a database of monument conservators in the Habsburg Empire (1850-1918). 

Giuseppe Andolina is a PhD student at Ca’ Foscari in Venice. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of Roma Tre and University of Edinburgh (2017), with a thesis on the seventeenth-century theatrical academy within the workshop of Cavalier d’Arpino, under the supervision of Maria Cristina Terzaghi. His studies continued at the University of Bologna (2020), where, among other research interests and projects, he worked on Renaissance sculpture. His master’s thesis explored the critical fortune of Francesco Laurana in the 19th and 20th centuries, under the supervision of Andrea Bacchi. His PhD project examines 15th-century public architecture and monumental sculpture on the eastern Adriatic Coast through the prism of ‘Venetiasation’ of artistic production in Dalmatia and Istria.

Cristiano Guarneri is an architectural and urban historian. He received his PhD at the School for Advanced Studies in Venice (2010) with a dissertation on Peter the Great's Kunstkamera in St Petersburg, under the supervision of Howard Burns. His pre-doctoral research was conducted at the Fondazione Archivio del Moderno of the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio (University of Italian Switzerland), and in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, supported by the Bourse pour Chercheur Débutant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (2008). Since 2010, he has held postdoctoral positions at IUAV University in Venice and the University of Padua. He has taught history of modern and contemporary architecture as an adjunct professor at the Universities of Padua, Brescia, Venice Ca' Foscari, and at the École Nationale Superieure des Traveaux Publics of Yaoundé, and as a teaching assistant at the Universities of Brescia and Padua. Currently, he is a member of the affiliated AdriContArch project.

Ines Ivić is an art historian and medievalist who received her PhD at the Doctoral School of History (2020) and her Master’s degree in Medieval Studies, with a specialisation in Religious Studies (2016), both from the Central European University, Budapest. In her dissertation, she explored the role of the cult of saints as a mirror of cultural, artistic, political, and intellectual changes on the eastern Adriatic Coast. During her master’s studies in art history at the University of Zagreb (2015), she worked on archival documents relevant for the development of architectural and construction practices in the Republic of Ragusa during the early modern period. The general focus of her research interest lies within the sphere of cultural history and the adoption and adaptation of artistic and intellectual ideas between the two coasts of the Adriatic Sea during the late medieval and early modern periods.

Karla Papeš is a PhD student at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Art History and Croatian Language and Literature from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019 she defended an interdisciplinary thesis on the terminology of Croatian fortification architecture under the supervision of Jasenka Gudelj and Bernardina Petrović. Her PhD thesis explores military architecture on the eastern Adriatic Coast from the end of the 15th to the beginning of the 17th century, focusing on the dialogue between theoretical concepts and practical experiences in its construction.

Daniele Pelosi is a PhD student of Art History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Heritage Studies from the University of Milan (2014) with a thesis on the patronage of the Duke of Milan Galeazzo Maria Sforza, which examined the archaic tendency of the Duke's decorative campaigns in light of his political propaganda. After an internship at the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples, he received a Master’s degree in History of Art from the University of Milan (2019) with a dissertation on the patronage of Cardinal Marco Vigerio (1505-1516) of the young Domenico Beccafumi in Rome. His current PhD project investigates Cardinal Vigerio’s relations with artists, humanists, and patrons, focusing on his impact on the figurative strategies of Julius II’s pontificate (1503-1513) and the role he played in the artistic, religious, and cultural contexts of the Adriatic Coast during the late 15th and the early 16th centuries. 

Alberto Pérez Negrete obtained his PhD in History of Architecture with research that focused on provisional military architecture between the 15th and 16th centuries (in co-tutorship between IUAV and the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, University of Seville). In 2019, he was a fellow at the Giorgio Cini Onlus Foundation. He curated various exhibitions on the occasion of the fourth centenary of Francesco Morosini's birth: ‘Francesco Morosini at War in Candia and Morea’ (Venice, 2019) with Elisabetta Molteni and Silvia Peressutti, and ‘Francesco Morosini: The Defence of Venice between Sea and Land in Crete and the Peloponnese’ (Este, 2021). He is currently working on the spread of earthen construction techniques in the domains of the Venetian Republic and on the relationship between condottieri and military architects (between the 15th and 16th centuries).

Tamsin Prideaux is historian of the early modern period. She recently completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh (2022) under the supervision of Stephen Bowd and Emily Michelson, having previously obtained an interdisciplinary Master’s degree in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, also at Edinburgh (2016). Her PhD thesis analyses the relationship between immigrant merchants from the Levant and authorities in Venice, in particular the magistracy for economic affairs – the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research explores the detailed economic, political, and cultural negotiation between foreigners and the Venetian Republic, and more broadly the creation, maintenance, and disintegration of foreign trading identities between the Levant and Europe. She is currently a visiting scholar at Ca’ Foscari, collaborating with the AdriArchCult project as part of her Saltire Emerging Researcher Scheme award, supported by the Scottish Funding Council. Her current project will communicate information and visual evidence of migrant spaces in seventeenth-century Venice to the wider public.

Beatrice Tanzi is a PhD student at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Heritage Studies from the University of Milan (2013), and a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Bologna (2016). Under the supervision of Daniele Benati, she defended a thesis on the 16th-century painter Filippo da Verona. The focus of her research interest is the correlation between visual production and religious currents during the Reformation and Catholic Revival. Her PhD project explores the influence and outcomes of Agostino Valier's apostolic visitation in Istria and Dalmatia (1579-1583) on architectural production within the religious sphere.