Manuela Battaglia is a research fellow at the University of Pavia, Department of Humanities. Her research project deals with the reconstruction of the Roman rural landscape in the western part of the Oltrepò Pavese, with a focus on ancient rural economies and the relationships between towns and hinterlands.
In 2017, she earned her PhD at The University of Pavia and in 2019 she took part in an intensive post-doc course Archaeology and Science at The University of Milan.
Since 2016, she has collaborated with the University of Pavia on the archaeological research in Rivanazzano Terme (PV) as the director of excavation and fieldwalking survey and as the supervisor of the classification of materials. Since 2018, she has given seminars at The University of Pavia as Cultore della materia.
She is also a professional in the field of Preventive Archaeology, researching and preserving the Italian Cultural Heritage. She works as an excavation supervisor, coordinator of studies on finds, designer and editor for archaeological areas and museums, collaborating with the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio.

Francesca Bray, Emerita Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, is a historian of East Asia specialising in gender and technology, the politics of historiography, and the history of agriculture and food. Recent publications on food include Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (2015); ‘Feeding the farmers, feeding the nation: the Long Green Revolution in Kelantan, Malaysia’, in James L. Watson and Jakob Klein (eds), Handbook of Food and Anthropology, London: Bloomsbury, 2016: 173-199; ‘Health, wealth, and solidarity: rice as self in Japan and Malaysia’, in Angela Ki-che Leung and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds), Moral foods: the construction of nutrition and health in modern Asia, Hawai’i University Press 2019: 23-46; and a co-authored book, Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press 2023).

Giacomo Casucci holds a Master’s degree in Archaeology from the University of Florence and is a PhD candidate in History, Pre-classical ancient Near-East at the University of Pavia. His research project “Fires and cooking pots: foodways and culinary practices in Anatolia between the 2nd and 1st Millennium BCE” focuses on the foodways and the cooking tools – kitchenware and fire installations – widespread in Anatolia during the 2nd and 1st Millennium BCE.  He has conducted field work in Turkey, Iraq and Italy and he currently works at the ancient Hittite site of Uşaklı Höyük, in the heart of the Anatolian plateau (Yozgat, Turkey) and the multiphase site of Porsuk – Zeyve Höyük in Southern Cappadocia ( Niğde, Turkey).

Professor d’Alfonso earned his MA in Ancient Civilizations from the University of Pavia and his PhD in Ancient Anatolian and Aegean Studies from the University of Florence. Since then, he has worked as a post-doctoral fellow and adjunct professor at the Universities of Mainz, Konstanz, and Pavia. Currently is Full Professor of Western Asian Archaeology and History at the Institute for the Studies of the Ancient World, New York University and Associate Professor of Archaeology of Ancient Western Asia at University of Pavia.

His main research interests concern the social, juridical, and political history of Syria and Anatolia under the Hittite Empire and during its aftermath (16th-7th centuries BC). From 2006 to 2009 he was the director of an archaeological survey in Southern Cappadocia, and since 2010 he has concentrated his efforts on the site of Kinik Höyük (Niğde, Turkey).

I graduated at Rome “Sapienza” University in Pre- and Proto-history of the Near East and obtained my PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Free University, Berlin. I was postdoctoral fellow at ANAMED (Koç University, Istanbul) and Research Fellow of the German Archaeological Institute. I conducted field work in Turkey, Syria, Azerbaijan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. I participated in the organization of exhibitions and of the open-air museum at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Arslantepe (Turkey). I am currently coordinating the Research Infrastructure Heritage Science of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAW, Vienna). My main research interests are the formation of complex societies in Mesopotamia; practice theory; pottery studies; food politics and commensality; heritage studies; and gender studies.

Cristiana Fiamingo is assistant professor in African history and institutions (BA courses) and History and politics of sub-Saharan Africa (MA courses) at the University of Milan

My name is Dr. Sarah R. Graff and I am Honors Faculty at Barrett, The Honors College of Arizona State University, USA. I am an anthropological archaeologist who studies cuisine, cooking, and food preparation, in addition to the ceramic containers used for culinary practices and serving food. I am interested in the varied social interactions involved with food and how food is intertwined with politics. My current fieldwork is at the ancient Phrygian site of Kerkenes in the Yozgat Province of the Republic of Türkiye. Kerkenes was the largest city in Türkiye when it was inhabited, between 620 and 550 BC. I have also been working at the ancient city of Al-Baleed in Salalah, Oman. During the late ancient and medieval times, Al-Baleed was a significant port city in the Indian Ocean. Previously, my field project was located in the Orontes River Valley of western Syria.

My work focuses on Greek literature of the imperial period (the Novel, Lucian, Philostratus) and on Ancient literary criticism (the idea of prose, the sublime). I am currently co-editing a Dictionary of the metaliterary imagination of the Ancients (to be published by Classiques Garnier).

Chama is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the International Studies Group (ISG) at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His Bachelor of Arts with Education and Master of Arts in History were obtained from the University of Zambia, in 2011 and 2017, respectively. Chama, obtained a PhD in African History from the University of Pavia in 2021. His research interests include African social and economic history with special focus on food histories, food production and agricultural as we’ll as environmental history of Central Africa. His current research focuses on the production and consumption of cassava and maize in Zambia since the nineteenth century.

Shahrzad Irannejad is researcher in history of medicine in the Islamicate tradition. She is currently a PhD candidate at the interdisciplinary Research Training Group “Early Concepts of Humans and Nature: Universal, Specific, Interchanged”, JGU Mainz, Germany. In her current project “Localization of the Avicennean inner senses in a Hippocratic body”, she studies the Greek precursors to the various elements of the theory of Inner Senses as epitomized in the works of Avicenna. Her research, thus, deals with how concepts and ideas regarding the brain and the soul were transformed as they travelled beyond linguistic and cultural borders. Her other research interests include codicology and paleography in the Islamicate world, the era of paradigm shift in medicine in Qajar Iran, and the relationship between medicine and classical Persian cuisine.

Assaf Yasur-Landau is the head of the Recanati Institute of Maritime Studies, the founder of the laboratory for Coastal Archaeology and Underwater Survey, and co-founder of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. His research interests include the study of mobility, ancient economy and human adaptation in the Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron ages. Currently he is Co-director of the excavations of the Canaanite Palace at Tel Kabri and of the underwater excavations at Tel Dor.  He is the author of ca. 70 articles and five books and edited volumes, including The Philistines and Aegean Migration in the Late Bronze Age (Cambridge University Press 2010, 2014).

Stefano Maggi is Full professor in Classical Archaeology at University of Pavia. Since 2006 he has been Director of the Interdepartmental Research Center (since 2017 Study Centre) for the Didactics of Classical Archeology and Ancient Technologies (CRIDACT).
He has dealt with the Archeology of the Roman Cisalpine and of the western provinces: urban planning and architecture, statuary and portraiture; themes of classical sculpture and didactics of antiquity.

Gabriele Proglio (1977) is an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary History. He received his Ph.D. in Modern History at the University of Turin. From 2014 he has been a researcher in different institutions (European University Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Université de Tunis “El Manar”, Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, University of Ankara). His main research interests are migrations, borders and mobilities in the Mediterranean, postcolonial studies and decolonial thought, race and gender studies and the relationship between food/nutrition and memories of Europe. His current research project aims to study food and alimentation as lens through which it is possible to investigate mobilities of goods and people across the Mediterranean, from colonial periods to postcolonial conditions.

Fabio Rugge is professor emeritus of History of Poltical Institutions. His publications focus on public administration and local government with an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. He served as rector of the University of Pavia. In 2019, he was awarded the title of Grande Ufficiale by the President of the Italian Republic.

Maria Sole Sanasi d’Arpe debuted on Sette del Corriere della Sera during her philosophy studies, and later collaborated with numerous newspapers including Il Foglio, Il Tempo, L’Avanti, debuting with an interview with Massimo Cacciari: a reflection entitled “Ripensare l’Umanesimo ” about the anthology “Umanisti italiani. Pensiero e destino “introduced by an essay by the philosopher. Currently, she writes about cultural politics, philosophy, scientific humanism, and geopolitics for Leonardo Foundation-Civilization of Machines and La Discussione: where she edits the cultural column “Inactual Considerations- Considerazioni inattuali” and covers foreign policy as Cultural Editor-in-Chief. In 2019, she spoke at the Turin Book Fair about sustainable development; she is also on the Board of Directors of WFP ITALIA. She has been a subject matter expert for Paolo Mieli’s Passato e Presente program on Rai3 since 2020. She is the author of the collection of lyrics “L’incoscienza sensibile,” published for the Passigli poetry series founded by Mario Luzi with a preface by Massimo Cacciari, with which she won numerous literary awards.  In June 2021, at La Sapienza Faculty of Architecture, she held a lesson entitled “Poetry as a form of communication”. 

Maria Sassi, PhD in agricultural economics, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, Italy, where she teaches Food Economics and Agricultural Development and Quantitative Policy Analysis for Development. She is a member of the Technical Board of the Master programme in Cooperation and Development organised by the IUSS and the University of Pavia. She teaches a course on Food Security and Rural Development. She is the local director of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in International Development Studies; Country Representative of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes; an Expert at the Technical Assistance and Information Exchange instrument of the European Commission. She participated in several international research projects, supported by the European Union and International Organizations, such as the FAO and the UNDP, mainly focusing on food security issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, she has published articles in international journals on a variety of topics related to food security and agricultural development, primarily focused on the African context: Economic and Health Determinants of Child Nutritional Status; Impact of Climate Change on Cereal Market and Food Security; Commodity Food Prices; Food price volatility; and Global crisis and agricultural public spending.

Julia Seeberger studied history and cultural anthropology in Eichstätt, Göttingen, and Bamberg, where she completed her master’s degree with a focus on medieval history in 2015. Her PhD followed at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, where her thesis investigated the question, what role olfaction, the sense of smell and scent, did play in medieval (women’s) mysticism? The book is published under the title “Olfaktorik und Entgrenzung. Die Visionen der Wienerin Agnes Blannbekin“ and was awarded with the Romanesque Research Award 2019. Since 2019 she is Lecturer at the Chair of Medieval History at the University of Erfurt. Her research interests in the field of medieval history lie in women’s and gender history, history of religion and piety, body history, and history of the senses/sensual history. Her current research project focuses on food trends in the European medieval times. Currently she holds a research fellowship at Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani.