Dr Andrea Nanetti, BA, MA, PhD in Historical Sciences
Professor in the School of Art, Design and Media
With a Courtesy Appointment in the School of Humanities (History)
Founding Director, LIBER (Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Bookish and Experiential Research)
At NTU Singapore (2013 – Present Day)
Dr Andrea Nanetti received an international education in Italy (University of Bologna), France (Paris-Sorbonne), Germany (University of Cologne), Greece (National Hellenic Research Foundation), and the USA (Brown University). His training environment has been multidisciplinary. Mathematical, physical, computational sciences and entrepreneurship complemented a comprehensive combination of humanities, such as history, ancient and modern literature and languages, philosophy, philology, palaeography, archival and library studies. Although he was formally educated in the historical sciences, he has built his career around a combination of heritage studies with computational technologies and digital media in universities, research centres, charitable foundations, and the industry in several European countries, the USA, Australia, The Gulf Region, China, India, and Singapore.
In his career, before and after tenure, he has kept a very active profile in academic publications, exhibitions, and media productions. His work has appeared in English, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Greek. He has been especially concerned to show how digital history can empower philological accuracy and historical method with cloud-based computational processes. He showcases this approach in his study of the history of Venice as contextualized within late medieval Afro-Eurasian trade systems. To achieve this synergistic approach, he has had to master paleography and diplomatics in Latin, Greek, Medieval French, Medieval German, Demotic Greek, Catalan, and Vernacular Venetian. This work also allowed him to produce numerous critical editions, all of which have garnered praise for their methodological rigor. Attention can especially be drawn to his four-volume critical edition, The Morosini Codex: The World as Seen from Venice (which includes one volume of historical studies, 2010). Based on this research on primary historical sources, his Atlas of Venetian Messenia (Greek Ministry of Culture and State Archive of Venice, 2011), and the recent books At the Origins of the Venetian Sea State (National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2018) and Venice and the Peloponnese, 992-1718 (Ca’ Foscari University Press, 2021) are perhaps the most original of the works on which his international standing as a scholar of the history of the Venetian maritime state is based. In parallel, the award-winning paper “Interactive Global Histories: For a New Information Environment to increase the Understanding of Historical Processes” (Culture and Computing, Kyoto, 2013), and the special issue on “Revisiting the World of Fra Mauro’s Map and the Morosini Codex from an Artificial Intelligence Perspective”, invited by the editor in chief of the journal The Asian Review of World Histories (Brill, 2016), introduce new approaches to digital history. More recently, the paper “Defining Heritage Science,” published in Complexity (online, 2021), and the book “The Engineering of Historical Memories” published by Routledge (London and New York, 2022) present a new original and interdisciplinary path to Computational Human Sciences.
Leveraging these capabilities, his most significant breakthrough in Historical Sciences is an international initiative for the Engineering of Historical Memory (EHM), calling for free access to primary historical sources. EHM functions as a cloud-based system to design structures to make historical memory (i.e., the processes by which societies create narratives about historical events) machine-understandable and, ultimately, turn history into a computational discipline through an interdisciplinary blend of philological accuracy, historical scholarship, and computational tools.
This CV reports a selection of Dr Nanetti’s most significant research, teaching, and service achievements. Upon request, it can be shared a thorough Vitae et Studiorum Cursus with a complete list and more details about all accomplishments.