Luna Sarti is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Luna holds an undergraduate degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures and a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Florence, where she worked on literary renderings of landscape and the tension between feminism and post-modernity in Israeli writers. She also completed a Master’s of Arts degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, focusing on the role of rhetorical strategies in Berlusconi’s Middle Eastern foreign policy. Recipient of the PPEH (Penn Program in Environmental Humanities) 2017-18 graduate fellowship and currently a member of the Penn Rising waters Project, she is interested in exploring how histories of water and humans intersect, thus spending a lot of time thinking through and with rivers. Her dissertation focuses on the shifting cultures and practices of water that bound the Arno river in Tuscany, thus shaping not only the Tuscan landscape but also its history and literature. The scope of this research is to analyze site-specific medieval and early modern conceptions of flooding in order to discuss if, when, and how flood is to be considered a “natural disaster.” Part of her more recent work has been published on the PPEH blog, the On-Water Intensive Research Seminar blog and the Blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas, for which she serves as a contributing editor.
Recent Publications
"Dante and the Water Cycle in the Commedia: God, Physics, and Flowing Waters," Dante Studies (forthcoming).
Awards
2017 Salvatori Research Award, Center for Italian Studies, University of Pennsylvania
2017/2018 PPEH Graduate Fellow, University of Pennsylvania
2018 Mellon PPEH Summer Graduate Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania
2018/2020 Penn Rising Waters Graduate Intern, University of Pennsylvania
2019 Dean's Scholar Award, University of Pennsylvania