Luca Zenobi

Luca Zenobi joined the Institute in 2026 to work on the FIS-funded project Travellers’ Interactions in Early Modern Italy (TRAVEL). Within the team, he focuses on urban centres defined by the presence of a major university (notably Bologna, Macerata and Pavia), examining how the steady flows of students and scholars shaped a city’s relationship with movement itself.

Before ISIG, Luca was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2023-2025), thanks to an individual grant from the British Academy, and a Research Fellow at Cambridge (2019-2022). He holds a PhD from Oxford (2019) as well as degrees in history and archival studies earned in Milan.

Grounded in the archives of Renaissance Italy, Luca’s interests revolve around three questions about pre-modern life: how space was built and organised; how people moved and communicated across distances; and how nature shaped – and was shaped by – both of those phenomena.