Research: The intermediary role played by local officials and barons in the Papal States: The Case of Spoleto at the end of the Fifteenth Century
Nao MASUNAGA studied Italian Renaissance History and graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University, Japan in 2013. Her thesis was titled ‘The Fabric Trade in Venice in the Fifteenth Century’, and she acquired the qualifications of Japanese Curator. She obtained her Master of Letters degree, also from Kyoto University, in 2015. The title of the thesis was ‘The Republic of Florence and Antonio Ivani, a Local Secretary: The Case of the Revolt of Volterra (1472)’. Since 2015, she has been a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Social Science at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. In the spring of 2017, she won a research fellowship for young scientists (grant-type scholarship; two years) at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Tokyo. From 2017 to 2021, she studied at the University of Milan as a visiting student, frequently visiting the archives in Umbria to research manuscripts. In 2019, she received a two-year scholarship from the Heiwa Nakajima Foundation in Tokyo. Most recently, she obtained a PhD fellowship in European History at the Sapienza Università di Roma. Her research project title is ‘The Intermediary Role by Local Officials and Barons in the Papal States: The Case of Spoleto at the End of the Fifteenth Century’. She is also interested in fashion studies and has published a paper titled ‘When “Italianness” is Formed: The Collections of Dolce and Gabbana in the late 2010s’. In addition to her research activities, she writes essays in Japanese, one of which was published in the Japanese magazine Eureka in October 2021.
Preferred fields of study:
-The Renaissance Papal States, especially, the local administrative structure in Umbria
-Political communication and letters
-The reign of Papa Alexander VI（r. 1492-1503）and the Italian War