Francesca Fulminante

After a PhD from Cambridge University (2008) and post-doctoral positions at excellent Universities and Institutes across Europe, including a Marie Curie Sklodowska Fellowship at the University of Roma Tre (2014-2016), Francesca Fulminante is now Senior Researcher and Lecturer both in the UK (University of Bristol and Cambridge) and Italy (University Roma Tre). Her research investigates Mediterranean urbanization during the first Millennium BCE with a focus on central Italy (Le Sepolture Principesche, L’Erma di Bretschneider 2003 and The Urbanization of Rome, CUP 2014). She has contributed to many excavations (Rome, Veii, Pompeii, Crustumerium, Colle di Marzo). She published extensively on macro-economic, social, and productive aspects of urbanization such as social stratification, reflected in burial practices, settlement centralization, transportation networks and political agency or community practices in smelting techniques. She has also investigated and published on more intimate and individual subjects such as breastfeeding/child-rearing practices and gender issues in first millennium BCE Italy and more widely in the Mediterranean. In 2020-21, at the Max Weber Kollegium, she has worked with the Urbanity and Religion cluster, led by Jörg Rüpke and Susanne Rau, to investigate the complex relationship between religious agency and urban settings in Early Iron Age central Italy to teas out if and how, paraphrasing a famous sentence of Francois de Polignac, “the city contributed to the rise of the sanctuary, or the sanctuary contributed to the rise of the city?"