SSE1K
Science, Society and Environmental Change in the First Millennium CE

Full Professor of medieval history and PI of SSE1K at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at University of Cambridge (2001-2008) and Theology at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (2007-2008). She held posts at Cambridge, University of Leicester, University of Exeter, and Durham University before joining Ca' Foscari. Her research focuses on Europe and the Mediterranean from late antiquity to early Middle Ages, with interests in environmental history, Christianity, theology, and intellectual history. She authored “Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England” (2013) funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship. She participates in the Bova Marina Archaeological Project and serves on the advisory board for the Richard Rawlinson Center at Western Michigan University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Post-doc at Ca' Foscari University of Venice who obtained his PhD in Archaeology from Ghent University (joint program with University of Verona, 2023), focusing on Ravenna's hinterland evolution using geoarchaeological methods. He worked as a Post-graduate Research Fellow at ISAC-CNR (2022-2023). He holds degrees from University of Bologna (BA and MA, 2011-2017) with research stays at University of Leicester and Leiden University. He leads the GEOARCHAMMI project (ESA, 2022-2024), co-directs RecLands (since 2023), and is field director of Faventia (since 2019).

Researcher in the History of Islamic Countries at Ca' Foscari University of Venice teaching in the Environmental Humanities master program. He holds a PhD focusing on the Iranian calendar and Abbasid period, examining fiscal and cultural dimensions. He shifted research toward premodern Arab environmental conceptualizations, particularly water-related. His work examines hydrology, meteorology, and water cycle thought from scholars like Thābit b. Qurra and al-Bīrūnī. Current interests include traditional irrigation, the sea in creation narratives, water's physical behavior, and historical climatic anomalies, shifting focus from Iranian and Mesopotamian to Islamic Mediterranean regions.

Full Professor in Quaternary Geology at the University of Basel's Department of Environmental Sciences. As a Quaternary geologist and palaeoclimatologist, he works with various climate archives including speleothems, lacustrine sediments, spring carbonates, and corals from Europe, Middle East, and Indian Ocean. His primary research goal involves constructing precisely-dated, high-resolution time series revealing climatic and environmental processes across geologic timescales from seasonal to glacial/interglacial cycles. His interdisciplinary research spans paleoclimate, geochemistry, hydrology, biology, meteorology, archaeology, and climate modeling.

Research Manager at Ca' Foscari University of Venice specializing in EU fund project management. She holds a PhD in chemistry from Monash University (Australia) with over 25 years' combined experience in academic research, technology transfer, grant writing, and industrial R&D. Her postdoctoral fellowship at Ca' Foscari (2007-2013) led to co-founding a technology-based startup (2012) and an independent scientific editing company (2015). She rejoined Ca' Foscari in 2023 within the Department of Humanities' Research Unit supporting ERC grantees.

Professor in the Archaeology of Southwest Asia at Durham University. He studied at UCL and University of Cambridge before completing his PhD at Durham as part of the Fragile Crescent Project. He worked as postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded Persia and its Neighbours project, then progressed through Assistant Professor (2015-2018), Associate Professor (2018-2023), to Professor (2023-present). He is a landscape archaeologist with interests in GIS, remote sensing, and computational approaches. He directs the Durham Archaeology Informatics Laboratory and is PI of the CLaSS ERC Starting Grant examining social complexity and climate change across Southwest Asia's Holocene.

PhD candidate at the University of Basel's Department of Environmental Sciences. During her MSc, she generated and worked with paleoclimate reconstruction records. She collaborates closely with historians and archaeologists to interpret data and understand past civilizations' resilience and adaptability.

Vicky Manolopoulou is a postdoctoral researcher at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She has held research and teaching positions at Durham University, Princeton University, King's College London, Northumbria University, and Newcastle University. Her research focuses on human–environment interactions in Byzantium, with particular expertise in religious mobility, ritual landscapes, and emotion. She has published on religious processions and liturgical movement, combining historical, archaeological, and digital approaches. She co-leads the Mesa Mani project in southern Greece and serves on the Executive Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.

Olga Palacios is a postdoctoral researcher specialising in quantitative and computational approaches to human-environment interactions. Her research focuses on developing and applying Bayesian modelling, machine learning, and agent-based simulation techniques to investigate socio-ecological dynamics, decision-making processes, and societal resilience. She holds a PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has conducted interdisciplinary research across Europe, Africa, and South America, integrating archaeological evidence with environmental proxies to explore long-term adaptation strategies.

Research grant holder at Ca' Foscari University of Venice focusing on intellectual and environmental history of the early medieval Mediterranean, particularly translations, scientific patronage, water management, and intercultural agricultural knowledge transmission. He holds a 2024 doctorate from Sorbonne University with a dissertation on scientific exchanges between Byzantine Empire and Caliphate (640-867). His interests encompass agronomic knowledge transmission across Greek, Syriac, and Arabic; technical literature like the “Geoponika”; and law, religion, and environment intersections in early medieval Mediterranean water management systems.

Post-doc at Durham University, a computational and digital archaeologist specializing in past human-environment interactions. She obtained her BA in History and research MA in Archaeology of North and Central Asia from Novosibirsk State University. She completed her PhD at Leiden University as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme TERRANOVA, researching earliest anthropogenic landscape impacts through Neanderthal and Mesolithic fire use. She bridges diverse spatial datasets using agent-based modeling, GIS, and 3D modeling.

Mateusz Fafinski is a senior researcher at the University of Erfurt. He specialises in the history of the first millennium with a particular focus on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He has written his dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin on the transition between Roman and post-Roman governance and religious structures in Britain (published in 2021). This was followed by a series of interdisciplinary post-doctoral fellowships in Stanford, Lausanne, Trier, and Tübingen, focused on manuscript studies and social and cultural history of the first millennium. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His recent publications concern interactions between monasticism and cities, palaeography of medieval mortuary rolls, Jerome's philosophy of history, and civil unrest in late antique cities.