Welcome to my page, where I store my publications, information about my projects, my CV, and infrequent blogposts about my research and my geek stuff.
My main line of research is human language, from its aesthetic uses to computational methods to investigate its history. I am a Ph.D. in “Literature / History of Literature” and I have already developed research in several areas, from ancient and medieval literature to Bayesian phylogenetic approaches. A friend once described my academic path as “curious”.
Until 2021 I am a Post-Doc/Programmer in the Computer-Assisted Language Comparison (CALC) group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte (MPI-SHH) (Jena/Germany), an ERC-funded project developing a computer-assisted framework that adapts methods from computer science and bioinformatics for their usage in historical linguistics. From February 2021 I will be a researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Philology of the Uppsala University, developing methods for analyzing culturally transmitted text traditions in a project involving sources as different as Early Christian aphorisms, Zoroastrian oral liturgies, and runic calendar staves from Scandinavia.
My focus is currently the development of methods that facilitate the use of phonological information in linguistic phylogenetics, from sound correspondences to inferences of sound changes. It is a specialization of different experiences with phylogenetics, including new alignment methods and computational approaches alternative to the more usual Markov Chain Monte Carlo. In less theoretical research, I have worked on the phonological evolution of families like Sinítica, on the phylogeny of the Tupian family, and on the application of evolutionary methods to the study of the tradition of Divine Comedy.
Latest posts
- Blog updates (30 December 2020) -- My main goal for this website and blog is to have something easy to update and to browse, as discussed in the previous post on “less is more. Two important things were still missing for a “proper” site/blog: some kind of analytics, so that I can know at least approximately...
- Less is more (21 December 2020) -- I spent a considerable part of my doctorate researching minimalism in the arts, with certain restrictions on der Rohe’s proposals. But this post is not about the contrast between modernist action, neoclassical marble and the purpose of the ruins: it is about my new page and this blog. 330 North...
Social
And here, the social media icons that can no longer be missing from a page:
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