Carlotta Moro is leaving the Cultures of Philosophy project in the summer of 2026 to take up an assistant professorship in Italian Studies at UC Berkeley in California: here she tells us about her past two years at Exeter…
What research have you undertaken as a postdoc?
The fil rouge in my research is the recovery of women’s voices long marginalised from the canon or, at times, consigned to outright obscurity. More specifically, this Postdoc gave me the opportunity to excavate women’s philosophical contributions in seventeenth-century Italian literature.
The first strand of the CultPhil project (“Genres”) focuses on natural philosophy in forms of writing not usually considered to be philosophical, while the second (“Exchanges”) seeks to trace women’s participation in scientific networks. To address these objectives, I have been working on our essay collection Women Writing Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, to which I am also contributing a chapter on the earliest years of the Academy of Arcadia (approximately between 1690 and 1711). This was a deeply influential Academy in Italy, and one that accepted an extraordinary number of female members. While the first generation of Arcadian women is typically excluded from studies of natural philosophy within this organisation, my chapter highlights their role as important actors in learned circles and agents in knowledge-making processes.
An author who has loomed large in my work during the past two years is the Venetian Moderata Fonte (1555-1592), known mostly for the feminist dialogue The Worth of Women (1600). Recently, she has been studied not only as a letterata, but also as a philosopher. Building on this momentum, I am guest editing a Special Issue of Renaissance Studies dedicated to her. My article explores her lyrical theology in her biblical poems on the Passion (1582) and the Resurrection of Christ (1592). This approach, reading poetry with an eye to its theoretical dimensions, aligns closely with the first strand of our project.
As part of this strand, I am also writing a monograph on Lucrezia Marinella (ca.1571/9-1653), which would constitute the first comprehensive study of her devotional literature. While a growing body of scholarship recognises Marinella as a philosopher, it relies almost exclusively on her treatises The Nobility and Excellence of Women (1600) and Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please (1645). My monograph expands the focus to Marinella’s devotional corpus, where her distinctive synthesis of philosophical and theological reasoning comes to life.
Another aspect of my work on CultPhil, and perhaps the one that has kept me most occupied, is a bilingual critical edition of Camilla Bonfiglio’s (1580-1649) Libro di lodi delle donne e della crudeltà de gli uomini / Book in Praise of Women and on the Cruelty of Men (ca.1602-1619). Entering in dialogue with Marinella, among others, Bonfiglio composes a radical pro-woman treatise that condemns ‘male tyranny,’ ending with a poetic prayer to the Virgin Mary for the liberation of the female sex. My edition reconstructs Bonfiglio’s biography, provides a transcription and English translation of her manuscript, while also contextualizing and examining her pioneering ideas. The goal is to bring this largely forgotten Messinese author to the attention of an international readership, and to reestablish her rightful place as one of Italy’s trailblazing feminists.
Finally, for the third strand of the project (“Identities”), my colleagues and I are collaborating on an article that explores the emic nomenclature used to define a female philosopher across Italian, French, English, Dutch and Neo-Latin languages. I am exploring the reasons why women were rarely called “filosofe” (philosophers) by their contemporaries, who instead resorted to a series of ingenious circumlocutions that stopped short of the noun itself – such as “learned in philosophy,” “proficient in philosophy,” “disciple of a male philosopher,” “author of a philosophical work,” etc.
Can you explain the research questions and methods driving your work?
My projects on Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, now much expanded and evolved, are offshoots of my AHRC-funded PhD research. My thesis, titled Gender and Faith: Feminism, Mysticism, and the Bible in the Works of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, was driven by the conviction that to disregard the role of Catholicism in their creative works and efforts to uplift women means missing a crucial aspect of their thought. While during my PhD I chiefly explored their representations of holy women, I am now delving more deeply into their philosophy and theology. The main question with which I approach their texts is: To what extent and in what ways did devotional literature transcend its function as an expression of piety, becoming instead a site for philosophical and theological speculation, and for the construction of alternative idea of womanhood? A similar question animates my research on the Academy of Arcadia: what is the scientific valence of Arcadian pastoral poetics? How do literature and natural philosophy intertwine in this space?
More broadly, I am interested in the methodological challenge of recovering a heterogeneous picture of early modern culture, beyond the “usual suspects.” How to listen to women’s voices when they are ventriloquised by male authors and refracted through semi-fictional literary narratives? How to trace women’s philosophical ideas when they contributed to an oral, rather than textual, culture? Such work, I find, requires recourse to the arsenal of resources provided by gender studies, and serious attention to the literary genres and forms that carry an echo of women’s contributions.
Beyond the traditional tools of any historian and literary scholar (close reading, intertextual analysis, archival research), I draw on approaches that attend not only to what is readily present in the text, but also to what may have been effaced: from Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reading against the grain, and from Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation to Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s hermeneutics of suspicion.
Recent scholarship has revalued uncertainty, ignorance (Sandrine Parageau 2023), ineffability (Kevin Killeen 2023), and doubt (Marco Faini 2023; 2025) as integral to early modern philosophy. This reframing has inspired my own method: by expanding what we deem knowledge-making, it has allowed me to be more inclusive in scope, and to move beyond the the famous male philosophers towards their necessary, but overlooked intellectual partners.
Above all, I found inspiration in the work of my colleagues Cat, Floris, Helena, and Felicity, from whom I learned a great deal also in terms of methodology. Their approaches have opened up previously neglected ground, including: the philosophical valence of women’s reflections on their experiences of motherhood (Cat), the natural philosophical dimensions of theological writing (Floris), the dialogue form as an epistemological method, and natural philosophy in literary genres usually associated with leisure (Helena), and methods to comb through the archives of all-male societies to recover women’s voices (Felicity). Do keep an eye out for their forthcoming publications!
What have been the highlights of the postdoc experience for you?
I could not have asked for a better Postdoctoral experience. The intellectual calibre of my colleagues has been matched only by their kindness and generosity. Doing justice to all the rewards of this experience would require me to write a book, rather than a blog. I will do my best to honour some of the highlights here.
I leave this project much enriched, intellectually, by the experience. It has made me realise how fruitful the combination between history of philosophy and literary history can be, as philosophy and literature were not at all neatly separate in early modern Europe. In many ways, CultPhil has removed some blinkers: where I once conceived of these women solely as literary writers, I now see how inseparable their writings are from their philosophy.
By far the main highlight of the past two years has been the privilege of working alongside a brilliant, generous team. I have lost count of the perceptive insights and supportive comments that Helena, Felicity, Cat, and Floris have shared with me. Not only they introduced me to new methods and fields through their scholarship and book recommendations, but they also carefully read my work, pointing out areas for improvement and making it stronger. I have cherished the unique opportunity to learn from them and through their example, by reading their ground-breaking research before publication, witnessing their nascent ideas, and observing the way they think and analyse texts. I will miss our weekly meetings.
Another perk of the job has been the opportunity to travel extensively, with research trips, conference preentations, and summer schools taking me to Messina, Palermo, Florence, Genoa, Copenhagen, Boston, Munich, Nantes, and Dublin. These occasions, alongside the two conferences we organised together in Exeter, expanded my network considerably. I had the opportunity to meet remarkable people whose work I admire and from whom I have learned a great deal.
Do you have any tips for other postdoctoral researchers?
Most PhD students envision the next step as another solo project, but I would recommend anyone with the opportunity to undertake a collaborative Postdoc instead. Teamwork, if it’s the right fit, offers the same freedom to develop your own research questions and define your corpus with the added, invaluable benefit of a community. I have gained a circle of readers and collaborators who helped me navigate the inevitable difficulties, and their combined expertise has taught me more than I could have learned on my own.
What next?
I am moving to California to take up an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. I look forward to bringing the knowledge gained from CultPhil into my new role.