Dr. Filomena Viviana Tagliaferri

I am a lecturer in didactic of history and the history of the Ottoman Empire at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and holder of a MSCA-PNRR grant (FIVIBET project). I got my PhD at the University of Florence in 2011. From 2011 to 2013, I was a visiting scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London) in the Department of Turkish Studies, before being appointed research fellow at King’s College London at the Centre for Hellenic Studies, while also working as a research assistant at Royal Holloway, University of London, for Professor Sandra Cavallo. From 2013 to 2016, I was a research fellow at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies – Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (IMS-FORTH) of Rethymno (Greece), first as an Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Fellow, which funded my research project Όλα τα πράγματα είναι ένα? Being Catholic in an Orthodox Sea (17th century). This research project was followed by a one-year IKY (State Scholarships Foundation, Greece) post-doctoral fellowship (2014). In 2015-2016, I was awarded two IPEP (Foundation for Education and European Culture, Greece) minor grants to rework my doctoral thesis into my first monograph, which was published in April 2018. In 2017–2020, I was awarded a three-year research grant MSCA Global Individual Fellowship for the research project MedRoute: on the Route of Multiculturalism(s). This project was undertaken at the Istituto di Storia per l’Europa Mediterranea – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ISEM-CNR) in Rome, while the two-year outgoing phase was spent at the History Department at the University of Maryland, College Park (MD-USA).

As a scholar, I have a particular interest in people’s mobility and cultural and social pluralism in urban environments in the early modern period. There are three main emphases to my research: an analysis of the changing mentalities of cultural overlapping in places and periods, the way in which accessible print and written circulation of information influenced the acceleration of certain historical processes, and the way visibility defines cultural affiliations. The scale of my research is often micro-historical, with a focus on subjects who have experienced displacement – migrants, travellers, foreigner communities. For my PhD, I focussed my attention on early modern travel accounts, letters and written avvisi form the Ottoman empire and the central Mediterranean and their role in conveying a new perception of the wider world and different cultures. My PhD was thoroughly reworked and then published in the monograph, Tolerance Re-Shaped in the Early-Modern Mediterranean Borderlands: Travellers, Missionaries and Proto-Journalists (1683-1724) (Routledge, 2018). This work formed the theoretical background for my my MedRoute project (http://www.medroute.eu/), where I enquired the phenomenon of cultural pluralism in four Mediterranean port cities of the late 17th and the early 18th centuries through three identity markers (foodways, clothing, and language). The project aimed to chart how differences in the political and physical environments affected the balance of acculturation in the port-cities of Izmir, La Valletta, Livorno and Marseille, shading light on the ways different plural spaces took shape in early modern Mediterranean and on how members of foreigner groups handled coexistence following different strategies (https://www.youtube.com/@filomenavivianatagliaferri7373 ). My current project – FIVIBET Foreigners and Institutions: Visible Identities Between Tyrrhenian and Thames (Late 17th – Early 18th Centuries) – aspires to present a new perspective on the dynamics of the acculturation of foreigners and minorities in port cities. Through the comparison between the ports of Livorno and London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the project aims to analyse the visibility of foreigners and minorities as a result of the interplay of the institutional concept of cultural diversity and the visibility of the alien elements subjected to said institutions. FIVIBET stands in strong continuity with the MSCA MedRoute project, both in terms of themes, sources, and methodological approach. At the same time, it also constitutes a step change, with the proposition of the research model applied in the MSCA to the Mediterranean being extended to Northern Europe. This approach seeks to overcome the bias induced by ‘Mediterraneanism’ that has led to the Mediterranean as an area of study hardening into a conceptual category.

Currently, I am working on the update and publication of my first research work on early Elizabethan cheap print as a crucial aspect of the Catholic-Protestant debate in 16th century England, and on two edited volumes – the first of the visibility of foreigner groups in early modern port cities (Manchester University Press) and the second on early modern Mediterranean migration narratives (Brill, with Matteo Al Kalak and Maria Chiara Rioli).