Carlotta Castellani, Ph.D.

Carlotta Castellani is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo. She is currently working at the research project Modernism and Organicism with Hannah Baader and Venanzio Raspa. Her research focuses on the mutual dialogue between art, visual culture, and science during the Avantgardes. She studied at the University of Florence (B.A. 2006, M.A. 2008) and at the University of Pisa ("Diploma di Specializzazione" in Art History, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in Art History, Literature and Cultural Studies in a joint program of the Universities of Florence and Paris IV Sorbonne (2016) with a dissertation on The myth of the artist and of the work in Balzac's "Le chef d'œuvre inconnu". At the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, she was Wissenschaftliche Assistentin of Max Seidel (2009–2017). During her PhD in Art History, she was awarded of the fellowship by the Fondazione Ambron Castiglioni in Florence, worked at the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio in Florence (2016) and, since 2014, has been responsible for the historical archive of the German artist residency Villa Romana.  She was awarded of “Premio città di Firenze” for her doctoral thesis and of postdoctoral fellowships from Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, in a joint program with the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2019), and the “4ALaboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies Anthropologies, Aesthetics”, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut, Berlin (2020). She is a founding member of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) and is currently organizing the „12th International ESPRit Conference (Urbino, 2024): Periodicals: S.T.E.A.M. AHEAD“ (11-13 September, 2024, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy).

Interessi di ricerca

• Transnational and transdisciplinary readings of the Avantgardes
• Modernism and science
• Periodical studies
• German and Italian art, illustration, and photography of the twentieth century
• Art criticism in nineteenth-century France
• Art of the Eighties
• Contemporary Art and historical Archives

Pubblicazioni (Selection)

• Laboratori su carta. Avanguardismi nelle riviste italiane (1916-1922), a cura di Carlotta Castellani, Giuseppe Di Natale, Nicol Maria Mocchi, „Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate e Storia delle arti”, Vol. LXXVII nuova serie, supplemento al Fasc. 1 gennaio-marzo 2024.
• Castellani, ‘The Boom of Boone’: Mary Boone in SoHo in the early 1980s, in Women Art Dealers: Creating Markets for Moderrn Art, Veronique Chagnon-Burke and Caterina Toschi (eds.), Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024, pp. 185-200.
• Castellani, “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” alle radici della Modernità. Mito e identità dell’artista negli anni Trenta dell‘Ottocento, Bonner Romanistische Arbeiten, 124, Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin 2023.
• Castellani, El Lissitzky and the biocentric project 1:1, in „Getty Research Journal“, no. 16, August 2022, pp. 91-118.
• Castellani, El Lissitzky ‘biocentrico’: la fotografia come nuova sintesi tra Organismo e Meccanismo, in "RSF. Rivista di studi di fotografia", n. 11, num. monografico "Fotografia e ambiente", 2021.
• 2021 C. Castellani, The Hungarian MA circle in the Société Anonyme Collection: Sándor Bortnyik, László Péri and László Moholy-Nagy, in “Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin”, num. monografico special double issue „100th anniversary of the Société Anonyme, Inc.“, 2021
• Castellani, Una rivista costruttivista nella Berlino anni Venti: «G» di Hans Richter, Padova, Cleup, 2018.C. Castellani, Der Salone Villa Romana. Ein internationaler Ausstellungsraum im Florenz der 80er Jahre kuratiert von Katalin Burmeister. Rekonstruktion eines Archivs (1979-2004), mit einer Einführung von Maria Grazia Messina und einem Text von Giovanna Uzzani, Gli Ori, Pistoia 2017.