Dr. Giovanni Lista

Geburtsjahr: 1982 

Studium: 
PhD. "The Political Thought of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716)", European University Insitute, History and Civilization Department, Florence (Sept. 2011-March 2018)
M.A. International Relations - Politics and Institution of the EU, Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, Rome (2006-2010)
B.A. Political Sciences - European Studies, Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, Rome (2001-2006)

Wissenschaftliche Anstellungen bzw. Tätigkeiten: 
Short Term Research Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), Wolfenbüttel (April - June 2024)
"Translating Fontenelle: Johann Christoph Gottsched's Gespräche von mehr als einer Welt (1726) as a scientific encyclopedia"
Wiedemann Fellow for Enlightenment Studies, IZEA (October-November 2022)
"'Herr Gottsched wird der Teutschen Fontenelle': German Translations of the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1726-1771)"
Investigating member, COSTAction, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence (July 2021-September 2023)
'People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Discplacement across the Mediterranean (1492-1923)'
Early Career Fellow, Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen (October 2018-July 2019)
Main investigator for the project 'Globalising the Enlightenment: Knowledge, Culture, Travel Exchange and Collections'
Research Associate, European University Institute, Florence (April - August 2018)
European Translators in the Long Eighteenth Century (EUTEC)

The Plurality of Fontenelle's Worlds. Translations, Transfers of Knowledge and Natural Philosophy in Europe (1687-1780)

Duration: 1.10.2024-30.09.2026

The research I intend to pursue during the 3 years period funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung focuses on the production of translations as means of transmission of knowledge in the long eighteenth century. My main purpose is to address some of the debates on natural philosophy at the core of the Enlightenment period in an innovative way: by reconsidering the traditional approaches employed within the interdisciplinary field of translation studies. The proposed research revolves around the preparation of my second monograph, which focuses on the single greatest astronomical bestseller of the eighteenth century: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), and its Italian, German and English translations as one interconnected case study. In adopting a transnational European perspective, I seek to appraise the several versions of the Entretiens over a timespan going from 1686 to circa 1780 as interventions in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural conversations on natural philosophy, while recovering the agency and voices of translators mostly unknown to present historiography.

Update 2025:

In pursuing my research project financed by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung in 2025, I have completed extensive archival research in Italy and the UK. In the months of January to April, I have been a Visiting Fellow at the SAGAS Department of the University of Florence. In that period of time, I consulted several manuscript and printed sources in the archives of Florence, Siena, Arezzo, Cortona, Naples and Bologna. I developed a side-project revolving around Etruscan Academy in Cortona in correspondence with the upcoming tricentenary of its foundation in 2027. In the months of September to December, I have been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) of University College in London (UCL). The National Archives and the British Library constituted my focus of the archival research, which brought to light an anonymous translation in English of Fontenelle’s Entretiens undiscovered so far. The results of this transnational archival research is currently under review, and will be published in 2026.