Lavinia GAZZE'
PhD in Storia della Cultura, delle Società e del Territorio nell’Età Moderna, she was a visiting researcher at the Department of History, University of Malta. As an Associate Professor of Early Modern History (HIST-02/A) during the 2025–2026 academic year, she taught Early Modern History for the Bachelor’s degree programs in Beni Culturali, and Lingue e Culture Europee, Euro-Americane e Orientali; Storia europea dell’età moderna e contemporanea for the Master's degree program in Lingue e culture comparate; and Storia della Sicilia medievale for the Bachelor's degree program in Pianificazione e gestione del turismo culturale at DISUM, based in Syracuse.
Recipient of the 2013 "Federico Chabod" Prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for her studies on resource and territorial policies between the 16th and 18th centuries, she participates in several national and international research projects (PNRR 2022, A Database on the Slave Trade between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic (15th-16th centuries); PRIN 2022, One Hundred Years of European Historiography. Study and Valorization of the "Rivista Storica Italiana"'s Archive). She has published contributions on research related to the control and management of territorial resources, migration and inclusion processes in the 16th-century Mediterranean, central and peripheral government systems, and epistolary networks between European intellectuals and the Sicilians Rosario Gregorio and Saverio Landolina.
She has participated in several national and international research projects. Recently, she was involved in the 2022 PNRR project, "A Database on the Slave Trade between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic (15th-16th centuries)", a study on the relationship between Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as the 2022 PRIN project, "One Hundred Years of European Historiography. Study and Valorization of the 'Rivista Storica Italiana's Archive", where she analyzed the scholarly debate on the Italian Enlightenment between Giuseppe Giarizzo and Franco Venturi in the Rivista Storica Italiana.
Her research covers land management, migration and inclusion processes in the 16th-century Mediterranean, early Jesuit missionaries in the East, 18th-century epistolary networks and correspondence between European and Sicilian intellectuals, slavery in Sicily, and connections with the trans-Saharan slave trade in the 15th and 16th centuries. Since 2020, she has been collaborating with Professor Gino Fornaciari, former director of the Institute of Paleopathology at the University of Pisa, on historical research regarding the aristocratic burials of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples. In collaboration with Professor Fornaciari, she also conducts historical research on the remains buried in the Medici Chapels in Florence, specifically focusing on the family of Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, Eleonora of Toledo, Giovanni, and Garzia de' Medici. In 2022, she participated in a joint research project with the McMaster University Ancient DNA Centre in Hamilton, Canada, directed by Hendrik Poinar; this study successfully sequenced an ancient strain of Escherichia coli from a 16th-century mummy for the first time in the world, identifying the mummy and reconstructing its biography.
She is a member of the scientific committee of the international journal "Studia Borbonica: International Journal of Studies on the House of Bourbon" and the journal "Archivio Storico Siracusano". She is also a member of SISEM and TESA (Interdepartmental Research Center for "Territory, Development, Environment")