Fellows

Assistant Professor of Greek History
Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples

Davide Amendola is Assistant Professor (tenure-track) of Greek History at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples, where he also serves on the doctoral board in Archaeology and Cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean. Trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and the University of Pisa, his work combines philological and historical approaches with attention to material and archaeological evidence.

His research focuses on the Greek world from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, with particular attention to democracy, citizenship, and diplomacy across regions including Magna Graecia, Sicily, Athens, and Asia Minor. He works extensively with inscriptions and papyri, contributing both to the edition of new texts and reinterpretations of known sources.

Phyle Project:
His project, Reconfiguring the Dēmos, examines how the expansion and renegotiation of citizenship functioned as mechanisms of democratic resilience, enabling political systems to adapt to crisis and rebuild cohesion.

More information: https://www.ssmeridionale.it/davide-amendola/ 

https://unina-it.academia.edu/DavideAmendola

Associate Professor of History and Classics
University of Montana

Scott Lawin Arcenas is Associate Professor of History and Classics at the University of Montana. His research focuses on the history of democracy and political violence in ancient Greece. His recent book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2025), combines quantitative and qualitative methods to study patterns of conflict across Greek city-states.

His broader work spans travel and transportation, digital history, numismatics, and classical historiography.

Phyle Project:
He is developing several projects on political violence, democratic instability, and epistemic uncertainty in ancient historiography, as well as their connections to economic and institutional dynamics.

More information: https://www.umt.edu/world-languages-culture/people/default.php?ID=6615#ID=6615

Associate Professor (Maîtresse de conférences) in Ancient History
Université de Lille

Julie Bernini is Associate Professor in Ancient History at the Université de Lille (UMR 9028 – HARTIS). Her research focuses on Greek history, institutions, urban space, and epigraphy. She previously held positions at the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich and the ERC project Mapping Ancient Polytheisms.

Her work develops a spatial approach to civic life, combining epigraphic and archaeological evidence. Her book Plaise au peuple (2023) explores democratic decision-making in Hellenistic cities.

Phyle Project:
Her project, Struggling for Space, examines how control over public space shaped tensions between democratic communities and elites, and how spatial practices contributed to democratic resilience.

More information: https://pro.univ-lille.fr/julie-bernini

Senior Lecturer in History and Political Economy
King’s College London 

Federica Carugati is Senior Lecturer in History and Political Economy at King’s College London and co-leads a research group in the same field. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and works on the development of political, legal, and economic institutions in pre-modern societies.

She is the author of Creating a Constitution (Princeton, 2019) and A Moral Political Economy (Cambridge, 2021), and her work appears in leading academic and public outlets.

Phyle Project:
Her research explores citizen self-governance across time and regions, aiming to broaden the empirical and theoretical foundations for understanding institutional resilience.

More information: https://fededido10.wixsite.com/federicacarugati

Lecturer in Greek History
University of Manchester

Alberto Esu is Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Manchester. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2018). His research focuses on Greek democracy, institutions, law, and political thought.

His book Divided Power in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 2024) offers a reinterpretation of sovereignty through institutional structures in Greek poleis.

Phyle Project:
He studies how Greek democracies structured civic offices, arguing that institutional design—especially limited and well-defined authority—was central to democratic resilience.

More information: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/alberto-esu/

Assistant Professor of Ancient History
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich 

Moritz Hinsch is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at LMU Munich. His research focuses on the economy and society of the Greco-Roman world, especially risk, trade, and social organization.

Phyle Project:
His project examines how democratic institutions in Athens allocated risk, arguing that practices of transparency, accountability, and collective decision-making contributed to more equitable outcomes and political stability.

More information:  https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/staff/staff/hinsch/index.html 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics
Grinnell College / Florida State University (incoming)

Jesse James is a Classicist, historian, and lawyer specializing in ancient Greek law and its connections to modern legal systems. His book Laws of All the Greeks (Oxford, 2026) examines international law in the Greek world.

Phyle Project:
He studies legal systems during democratic crises and explores the decline of public, adversarial legal processes in modern societies.

More information: https://www.grinnell.edu/user/jamesjes

Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies
Fordham University

Dongxian Jiang is a political theorist and intellectual historian specializing in comparative political theory and the history of Chinese and Asian political thought. His research explores intercultural dialogue, the reception of Western political ideas in East Asia, and contemporary normative political theory.

His first book, Why China Needs Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2026), offers a sustained critique of influential interpretations of the “China Model” and advances a realist justification for constitutional democracy in the Chinese context. He has also written on twentieth-century Chinese political thought and on the modern relevance of Confucianism.

Phyle Project:
His project, Political Thinking in a Levelled Society, reconstructs a historical discourse that characterized imperial China as a “levelled” society and examines how this perspective shaped reflections on political equality and democratic possibility. By moving beyond cultural explanations centered on Confucianism, the project highlights how Chinese thinkers understood social structure, mobility, and hierarchy, offering a new lens on contemporary debates about democratization.

More information: https://www.fordham.edu/academics/departments/languages-and-cultures/faculty/dongxian-jiang/ 

Lecturer in Ancient History
University of Edinburgh

Marco Santini has been Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh since January 2025. He obtained his BA and MA in Classics from the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa, and his PhD in Ancient History from Princeton University. Prior to his current appointment, he served as Postgraduate Research Associate and Lecturer in Classics at Princeton University and as Fellow by Examination in Ancient History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He has also held a CECIL Visiting Fellowship at the University of Pisa and was appointed Evans-Pritchard Lecturer for 2026 at All Souls College, Oxford.

His research focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Iron Age (ca. 1200–600 BCE). He examines political thought, institutional practices, and the formation of communal and ethnic identities from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, with particular attention to Greece, post-Hittite Anatolia, and the southern Levant. His work is informed by engagement with a wide range of ancient languages, including Luwian, Hittite, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and Aramaic.

Phyle Project:
Within the Phyle Project, Marco investigates the political development of Iron Age societies across Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant. His research seeks to challenge the idea of Greek exceptionalism by situating early Greek political culture within a broader, interconnected system of political thought and practice shared across the Eastern Mediterranean.

More information: https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-marco-santini

Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science
Université Paris-Est Créteil

Chloé Santoro is a postdoctoral researcher in political theory at Université Paris-Est Créteil. She received her PhD in philosophy in 2025 with a dissertation entitled New Athens: On the Possibility of an Encounter Between the Polis and Contemporary Democratic Aspirations. In the same year, she was awarded the Collège de France Prize for Young Researchers in recognition of her contributions to public research. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Participations and acts as an expert and evaluator of deliberative processes for public institutions in France and Switzerland.

Her research is interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, political science, and ancient history. It focuses on radical democracy as a form of collective organization grounded in concrete institutional mechanisms, with particular attention to deliberative practices. Her work examines how recent developments in the historiography of classical Athens inform contemporary democratic theory, drawing on empirical observation of modern deliberative experiments such as the French Citizens’ Convention on End of Life (2022–2023). Her findings emphasize the importance of deliberation, social diversity, and affective bonds in building collective capacity, engaging closely with theories of epistemic democracy.

Phyle Project:
Within the Phyle Project, she investigates the relationship between deliberative and direct democracy. Her research focuses on the institutional role of the Athenian Council in structuring political problematization, and explores how deliberative mechanisms can prepare and shape collective decision-making in both ancient and contemporary democratic contexts.

More information: http://logiquesagir.univ-fcomte.fr/chloe-santoro/

Senior Researcher & Coordinator, Center for European Studies
Université de Fribourg

Riccarda Schmid is a historian and political scientist specializing in Athenian democracy, the dynamics of political communication and decision-making processes in ancient and modern societies, and the history of political thought. Her research is transdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of history, political theory, and communication studies. In her most recent project, she engages with the definitions and interdependencies of the concepts of democracy, freedom, and justice from antiquity to the present.

She received her PhD in 2023 from the University of Zurich with a dissertation on framing in fourth-century Athenian public discourse, and she is co-editor of the volume Demokratie und Populismus in der griechischen Antike und heute (De Gruyter, 2024).

Phyle Project:
Within the Phyle Project, she analyzes the effects of crisis and uncertainty in democratic societies. Her research centers on the competitive negotiation of normative interpretations surrounding core societal concepts, such as freedom or peace, and the role of deliberative practices in shaping collective judgment and stabilizing democratic systems.

More information: https://www.unifr.ch/directory/en/people/320324/8553e

British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Cambridge

Daniel Sutton is a historian of Greek and Roman historiography and political thought, with a focus on Thucydides and Sallust. His work explores how historical writing functions as political theory.

Phyle Project:
He investigates temporary democratic associations and their role within Aristotelian political theory.

More information: https://www.pet.cam.ac.uk/person/sutton