| Hello there! My name is Maddalena, I have a PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, in the city of Brotherly Love. That's me 👈, attending a conference I was invited to in Beijing in October 2019. At the time, I was living in Shanghai, working as research fellow at Fudan University 復旦大學. In 2021, I moved to Taipei 台北 and explored the beautiful Ilha Formosa, while finalizing my dissertatation.
I am currently a MacMillan Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies at Yale University. From 2022 to 2024, I was living in South California, working at Pomona College as the Rand Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese studies. Prior landing in the USA, I graduated from the University of Ca' Foscari in the beautiful city of Venice, and studied at Peking University and Leiden University.
| I am a scholar of ancient Chinese history. I work in particular with new manuscripts recovered by archeologists in the last decades in China. Lots was already known about ancient Chinese history, thanks to the so-called ancient cannon. This includes texts that did originate in the last few centuries BCE, but underwent direct and indirect changes as they were transmitted through the centuries. Conversely, the new manuscripts were buried underground, in tombs and pits, where they are now discovered. For these, we can pinpoint a more secure date of production, after which no alteration was possible given their place of rest. These manuscripts raise so many interesting questions! Where these copies made to be buried? Finding manuscripts in tombs is, so far, more the exception than the rules. Does this tell us something about the identity of the deceased, when no other clue is given?
With these questions in mind, I read and analyze the manuscripts' textual content, with two main goals in mind. One is that of figuring out how this new textual evidence fits in what was already known about ancient Chinese history through previous textual and archeological studies. And if it does not fit, how do we contextualize them? The second goal is that of making this work intelligible to scholars who work with ancient texts from other cultures. The Chinese culture is hardly the first one to be experiencing a "rethinking" of its roots because of archeology: think of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their impact on the Bible. Or the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Or how the discovery of mass graves in Greece in 1998 gave credit to accounts of the Peloponnesian war narrated in many texts.
I like to say that I work with contextualized ideas: can the manuscirpts help us understand how ideas developed, spread, and perished in Ancient China? After all, not all the manuscripts we read now were transmitted in the ancient canon. Which also makes sense: to make a canon it to exclude at least some materials. I attempt to trace the history of texts through generations, asking questions such as, What determined the success of a text, and thus its reproduction from generation to generation? This approach is sometimes referred to as the “Epidemiology of Ideas,” and it seeks to investigate what determines the survival or the dismissal of ideas. I work with documents produced during a very exciting moment in Chinese history: the Eastern Zhou dynasty 東周 (771–256 BCE), the first attested period of philosophical blossoming. These texts are primarily written on bronzes and bamboo strips.
| In my doctoral dissertation, Preparing one's act. Performance supports and the debate on human nature in early China, I take a complementary approach to the scholarship that looks at what ancient writings for their impact on the formation of a textual tradition overtime. I wrote about how ideas developed and circulated during the Warring States era (457 - 221 BCE), besides across generations. I analyze in particular manuscripts produced from the fourth to third century BCE, and select a series of texts that read as incomplete compositional gestures. These present abrupt interruptions; errors; incomplete stories; repetitions within the same story. I call these manuscripts "performance supports," and I argue that these were tools used by individuals who aspired to become active in the courtly environment of the Warring States era. Performance supports were used to learn concepts, vocabulary and terminology, archaisms and compositional features that would then be deployed to display one's knowledge, such as during oral debates.
I have a strong commitment to create collaborations with peers and senior colleagues – organizing conferences has become a central activity of my research. You can read more about this in the EVENTS page of this website. A fun part of this activity is to design flyers and trailers to promote these conferences among the scholarly community!
| This website is intended to collect all my activities as a scholar, and to share other passions of mine: photography and talking about books. My Sonyα6000 has become my trusted friend since February 2020. Pictures predating it have been shot with a Nikon D3100. You can read my take on the books that keep me company in Friends Of the Lento, a reference to the timeless piece by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Dawn.
