The flagship philanthropic endeavour of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies is the ACIS Cassamarca appointments in Italian Studies, as well as the ACIS Cassamarca Chair in Latin Humanism, all established thanks to a substantial bequest from the Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso. The Cassamarca appointees research and teach in a variety of discipline areas under the overall rubric of Italian Studies.

In 2021 two of our ACIS Cassamarca appointees, Associate Professor Nick Eckstein (University of Sydney) and Dr Luciana d’Arcangeli (Flinders University),  concluded their positions. Both Nick and Luciana have been great advocates for Italian Studies in Australasia as well as internationally and we thank them for their active contributions to ACIS and wish them both well for the next phase in their academic and personal lives.

We are pleased to announce that Dr John Gagné  has accepted the ACIS Cassamarca position at the University of Sydney, commencing in January 2022. John completed his BA at the University of Toronto and his PhD at Harvard University, and he has taught at the University of Sydney since 2010. John is a historian of Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries with a particular focus on the Italian Wars of the sixteenth century. He was Francesco de Dombrowski Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in 2016-17; and the Australian Research Council funded his project on writing paper and the challenge of obsolescence and lost documentation in early modern Europe from 2017-21. His book, Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars (Harvard University Press) appeared in 2021. 

Among other areas, his research explores material culture, gender, and the cultural history of war. He is currently at work on study of the materiality of premodern flags and banners with the art historian Timothy McCall. At Sydney he is also director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre. 

We are delighted to welcome John Gagné into the ACIS family.