Phd in HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, RELIGIONS

email: serena.dinepi@uniroma1.it
phone: 0649913395
building: Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia
room: 4 - Sezione di Storia moderna e contemporanea

Serena Di Nepi, PhD, is Associate professor of Early Modern History at the Department of History, Culture and Religion at La Sapienza - University of Rome. On March 19, 2018 she has been positively evaluated as associate professor. She is an expert on the history of societies and culture in Modern Era, with a special focus on the history of Jews in Early Modern Italy, and the social dynamics of the Roman ghetto. Moving from this, she is now stressing the history of Muslim slavery and conversion in the Papal States. She is a member of the history doctoral program committee at La Sapienza (2017). In 2016, together with Prof. Marina Caffiero, she designed the first Italian advanced specialization course in Jewish history; since fall 2017 she is the director of the course.
In 2015-2016 she has She has been visiting researcher at Hebrew University as a participant to a ERC project directed by prof. Yosef. Kaplan and she is now part of two granted Italian National Project on the history of Anti-Semitism. In fall 2017 she has been resident visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish History - Primo Levi Center in New York within the program "The Rome lab" (that she co-curated: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/rome-lab-calendar/). The project has been supported by Yeshiva University Museum, Yeshiva University, NYU and Casa Italia Zerilli Marimò. In 2014 Her book Surviving the ghetto. Toward a social history of the Jewish Community ni 16th century Rome (Rome: Viella, 2013) won the Cherasco Prize dedicated to young researchers.
She has been member of the Scientific Committee of MEIS between 2011 and 2015. In 2015 she was nominated member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan and of Jewish Museum of Rome. Since 2016 she is also a member of the board of the National Italian Jewish Heritage Foundation.
She represents the Jewish Community of Rome in the international research group on the Jewish library looted by the Nazis in 1943. The project is supported by a partnership with the World Jewish Congress and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic.
Current research
-A study of the history of the Universitas Iudaeroum de Urbe, in light of the discovery of unpublished documents on the Statute of the Jewish Community of Rome (1524). With Prof. Bernard Cooperman and Prof. Anna Esposito.
-Ghetto/Ghetti: a research project to map common rules and different configurations of Italian ghettos in early modern Italy. The history of the ghetto is analyzed in relation of the history of the premodern Italian states (before the unification of 1860); the history of Jewish relationships with Rome and Catholic Institutions; the history of the Western Sephardi diasporas; the history of conversion; and the history of other minorities in Italy.
- Sapienza Interdisciplinary Project (2017/2019): Medicine, Minorities, Prejudices: the Jewish Issue as an Interdisciplinary Case study. With Prof. Marina Caffiero and in cooperation with the Faculty of Medicine.
-Italian National Research Project (2017/ 2020): The Long History of Anti Semitism. Jews in Europe and the Mediterranean (X/XXI centuries): Socio economic Practices, Cultural Processes of Coexistence between Discrimination and Integration, Persecution and Conversion. With Prof. Germano Maifreda. With the University of Genova, Pisa and Milan and the CDEC Foundation.