Since 2006 Paolo Luca Bernardini is professor for Early Modern History at University of Insubria, Italy, where he is also founding chair of the Department of Human Sciences, Innovation and Territory since 2018. Between 2015 and 2016 he was inaugural fellow at the Maimonides Center for Advanced Study in Hamburg as well as inaugural fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study in Indiana between 2010 and 2011. From 2004 to 2005 Paolo Luca Bernardini was Fulbright Professor at University of Pittsburgh and from 2001 until 2006 Founding Director of the Center for Italian and European Studies at Boston University. Between 1998 and 1999 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Paolo Luca Bernardini’s research focuses on Eighteenth-Century Studies, Italian Studies, History of Political Thought, and Global History.

While at HIAS, Paolo Luca Bernardini intends to complete a monograph (200 pp. ca, ill., in English), on the subject of “Veritas filia temporis”, mainly, but not exclusively, in the European Renaissance. It is an interdisciplinary project, dealing with art history, philosophy, historiography, literature, and it is a European project, for he will focus on sources that are European in the broadest sense (including some from Central and Eastern Europe). Ideally, he aims to answer a delicate question: “Why Truth, that should be such, is not self-evident? Why must Truth normally emerge in a long, often painful process?”. For him, this is one of the keys to understand modernity. The “delay” in the process of appraising Truth and perceiving it as such, has been of paramount importance in the construction of theories related to morality, ethics, politics, and philosophy.

His collaboration partner is Giuseppe Veltri, professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion and director of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at Universität Hamburg.

Paolo Luca Bernardini’s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.