Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger). Venice: Tommaso Baglioni, 1610. Galileo's telescope is described in Latin and illustrated to help readers understand his astronomical discoveries.
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Professional Goals
I am exploring new opportunities that align with my long-term career objectives and professional aspirations in Digital Scholarship leadership and research
As a scholar specializing in the history of science and digital humanities, I've been working on a critical edition of Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical manuscripts
I'm actively integrating digital cultural heritage into educational experiences, and helping colleagues in digitally-oriented pedagogy.
I see myself as a book detective, examining ancient books and reading manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Thomas Harriot. I have training in paleography, codicology, and papyrology, as well as in Italian studies and the history of science. Many manuscripts are held in private collections or are available for purchase at auction houses, and I monitor the market closely and engage with collectors.
As an expert in material book history, I recognized that the so-called Galileo manuscript at the University of Michigan was a forgery before it was officially identified as such by specialists in Ann Arbor, MI. Given my commitment to verifying authenticity and detecting forgeries, I decided to quote the copy of Galileo's letter that I deemed reliable (Agostini, Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse, 2021). I have published my research for the Association for Computing Machinery, Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), La parola del testo: Rivista internazionale di letteratura italiana e comparata, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Scholars, and Galilaeana, among others. I have work in press with The University of Chicago Press, IDEAH, Theatre Journal, and HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. I am actively involved in academic communications and maintain a significant presence on Twitter, where I have over 4,300 followers, including Christie's Books (@ChristiesBKS).
I am active on the professional boards of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the PHAROS pilot project, The International Consortium of Photo Archives, Europeana Network Association, the New York City Digital Humanities group, and the Graduate Journal of Food Studies.
Agostini, Caterina. "Reading Collections in the Edison Papers." Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), 2023
Agostini, Caterina and Daniela Rovida. “Women in Early Modern Italy: Art and Printing” (2024)
Agostini, Caterina. Translation of Goro Dati's La Sfera, co-authored with Carrie Beneš, Elena Brizio, Laura Ingallinella, Monica Keane, and Laura Morreale (2022), https://osf.io/preprints/bodoarxiv/92ers/
---. "A Geospatial La Sfera: Navigating the Renaissance in the Mediterranean" co-authored with Carrie Beneš, in 5th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3486187.3490207
---. “Art in the Time of Syphilis: A Digital Humanities Approach toward Considering a Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography.” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), Volume 2, Issue 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.97921c12
---. “Santorio’s Medical Method at the Time of Corpuscularism.” La parola del testo, Rivista internazionale di letteratura italiana e comparata, XXV, 1-2 (2021): 87-99
---. “Communicating across Cultures: The Case of Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Pliny the Elder.” In Translation and Globalization across Classrooms, Communities, and the Humanities. Ed. Concepción Godev. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Publishing, 2018: 63-77. This study has been included in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) at Columbia University, in the Memory Studies bibliography and portal, and SOAR, Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers
---. “Personal Belief and Social Practice in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia.” Religion and Belief: A Moral Landscape. Eds. Malcolm Heath, Christopher Green, and Fabio Serranito. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014: 129-39.
---. “Sul filo della musica: armonia e scienza da Mersenne a Galileo.” Essay review of Natacha Fabbri, De l’utilité de l’harmonie (2008). Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies, X (2013): 237-244
---. “Real, Unreal and Magic in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia.” University of St. Andrews Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient Literature (2013)
Forthcoming:
Agostini, Caterina and Paul Israel. “Mediating and Connecting: Versatile Digital Publishing in the Edison Papers.” “Digital Editing & Publishing in the Twenty-First Century.” C21 Editions, ed. James O'Sullivan, 2024
Agostini, Caterina, Carrie Beneš, Elena Brizio, Laura Ingallinella, Monica Keane, and Laura Morreale. Goro Dati, The Globe (La Sfera), Italica Press, 2024
Agostini, Caterina. “Dear Galileo: Letters on Astronomy” in El Khatib, Randa and Caroline Winter, eds. The Changing Shape of Digital Early Modern Studies. Toronto and New York: Iter Press (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2024
Exploring call for papers at professional conferences and writing abstracts
💬 Keywords: Digital Humanities, History of Science, Galileo, material book history, IIIF
I recently concluded a rare books exhibit on the history of mathematics at Notre Dame, which ran from Spring to Summer 2024. I will be publishing an article detailing my curatorial experience with Making Books Count: Tracing the History of Mathematics through Books.
In 2022, I was awarded the inaugural D’Argenio Fellowship in History and Data Visualization at Seton Hall University (2021–2022) to study the D'Argenio Collection of Coins and Antiquities at Seton Hall University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, and Walsh Gallery.
Agostini, Caterina and Daniela Rovida. “Women in Early Modern Italy: Art and Printing” (2024)
Medieval Padua Painted City documenting 14th-century fresco cycles in Padua, Italy that were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, 2022
Thomas A. Edison Papers, 2021–2022
Dear Galileo: Letters on Astronomy, 2019
Santorio’s Medical Method, 2019
A Sourcebook of Early Modern Medicine, 2019
Agostini, Caterina, Natascia Cappa, Maria Teresa De Luca, Paul Israel, Lidia Levkovitch, Angela Mininni, Laura Morreale, and Paolo Scartoni, People, Place, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Ghent, 2018
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, Mapping the Early Modern World, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, Summer 2022
The D’Argenio Fellowships in History and Data Visualization, to write a historical study and create a data visualization of the Ron D’Argenio Collection of Coins and Antiquities at Walsh Gallery, Archives and Special Collections, and Seton Hall University Libraries, 2021–2022
2021 Rutgers School of Graduate Studies Excellence in Outreach and Service
Eugene Garfield Fellowship, Library & Museum Resident Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society (APS), Philadelphia, 2020–2021
Support for conference registration at the Renaissance Society of America virtual annual meeting 2021, from Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance
Rutgers University Excellence Fellowship, 2016–2017 and 2019–2020
Open Knowledge Practicum Fellowship at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Open Knowledge Program, at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, 2019
Renaissance Society of America DHSI Scholarship covering tuition for Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities, taught by David L. Hoover, and Text Mapping as Modelling, taught by Øyvind Eide, 2019
Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute, University of California San Francisco
Text Analysis with AntConc, Text Analysis in R, Cleaning Data in OpenRefine, 4-8 November 2024
Keynote, "Art in the Time of Syphilis: Medical Narratives and Digital Humanities in Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography," 6 November 2024
History and Philosophy of Science Conference, Indiana University Bloomington
“In Anticipation of the 2024 Eclipse," 7 April 2024
History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine Colloquium, Indiana University Bloomington
“Charting the Cosmos: Exploring Galileo’s Correspondence on Astronomy,” 22 February 2024
Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
“Working with Medieval Manuscripts or Art Historical Images using IIIF,” sponsored by the University of Notre Dame, the Medieval Academy of America, and Digital Medievalist, Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame
Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School
“The Harriot Papers: Transcribing De infinitis” with Robert Goulding, Dan Johnson, and Natalie Meyers
Technology as a Profession, University of Notre Dame
Professor John Behrens’s course, Technology as a Profession, 17 October 2024, 23 March 2023
Mentoring and advising Professor John Behrens’s students in the Technology as a Profession course, 2023–2024
Celebration of Galilei, University of Notre Dame and Pontifical Lateran University
Invited moderator and discussant, Notre Dame Global Gateway, “Che le cose recondite vengano in luce: Four hundred years from The Assayer by Galileo Galilei,” University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway in collaboration with the Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical Lateran University, 28 March 2023
Graduate Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh
Professor James Coleman’s graduate seminar, “Book of Islands: Mediterranean Networks and Texts, 1300-1700,” University of Pittsburgh, 1 February 2023 (online)
Graduate Seminar at the German Program, The University of Notre Dame
“Introduction to Text Editing,” visiting a graduate seminar taught by Professor CJ Jones (November)
Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute Lecture, Seton Hall University
“Currency, Culture, and the Ron D’Argenio Collection of Coins” (September)
Digital Palaeography Summer School, University of Göttingen
“Introduction to IIIF,” Digital Palaeography Summer School, University of Göttingen, 4 August 2022 (online)
Winter School, Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary Brazilian History, Rio de Janeiro
“IIIF for Cultural Heritage,” Fundação Getulio Vargas, Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary Brazilian History, Winter School on Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, 20 July 2022 (online)
DH Summer Institute at Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ
“IIIF in the Edison Papers" (online)
New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, FL
“Digital Traveling: Maps in Dati’s La Sfera”
Design Proposal and Presentation at Johns Hopkins University Press
“Versatile E-Books through IIIF,” my proposal of digital edition design
Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meeting
2022, Dublin
“Spatial Humanities: Pushing the Boundaries of Digital Objects,” a roundtable discussion with Diane Jakacki (Bucknell University), David Joseph Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi), Nicholas Terpstra (University of Toronto), Annie Hongping Nie (University of Oxford), Francesca Bortoletti (University of Minnesota), Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria), for the New Technologies and Renaissance Studies panel at RSA. Sponsored by Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
2021 (online)
Roundtable “Best Practices in Digital Collaborative Editing: A View from La Sfera”
“FromThePage, to the Culture” at the roundtable “Digital Collaborative Editing Best Practices: View from La Sfera,” New Technologies and Renaissance Studies, sponsored by Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
PHAROS, The International Consortium of Photo Archives, Executive Board
Moderator, with Alexander Supartono
IIIF Fall Working Meeting
"A Language Case Study: Italian IIIF," at the 2021 IIIF Fall Working Meeting, in the session "How do we reach the right people with IIIF?" (video recording on YouTube, 16:23-24:52)
Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Immaterial Culture
“Mapping La Sfera” (online)
Rutgers University Graduate Seminar on the Italian Baroque
“Galileo Galilei” in a Rutgers graduate seminar, Italian Department, Italian Literature in the 17th and 18th centuries: Baroque [in Italian]
Italian Research Day in New York City
“Science in History: The Case of Galileo Galilei” (“Scienza nella storia: il caso di Galileo Galilei”), a lecture for the Italian Research Day celebrations organized by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (Ministero dell’istruzione, dell'università e della ricerca) through the Italian Consulate of New York City [in Italian]
Interview with Music in Your Suitcase (“Musica in valigia")
Interview with the cultural association “Musica in valigia,” Treviso, Italy (online) [in Italian]
Digital Humanities
“Reading Rooms in The Edison Papers,” Digital Humanities Conference and Colloquium Online Edition, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 10 June 2022
“Digital Cultural Heritage: Medieval Padua Art in the UNESCO World Heritage List” for the panel “Teaching the Middle Ages Using Digital Mapping” sponsored by TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies) and Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 12 May 2022 (online)
A roundtable on Dati’s La Sfera, the New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 3-5 March 2022
“A Geospatial La Sfera: Navigating the Renaissance in the Mediterranean” with Carrie Beneš, 5th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021 in Beijing, China, 2 November 2021 (online)
“Digital Cultural Heritage: Medieval Padua Art in the UNESCO World Heritage List” for the panel “Teaching the Middle Ages Using Digital Mapping,” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 9-14 May 2022
Organizer and instructor for “Introduction to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF),” a professional workshop for pedagogy and interdisciplinary humanities at the NeMLA convention, 10 March 2022, Baltimore, MD
Organizer and instructor for Mapping with Digital Humanities Tools, a professional workshop for pedagogy and interdisciplinary humanities at the NeMLA convention, 10 March 2021 (online)
Introduction to IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework, New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH) Week, 9 February 2022 and 12 February 2021 (online)
Mapping with Palladio, NYCDH Week, 10 February 2022 and 10 February 2021 (online)
“Textual Analysis and Teaching with Digital Humanities Tools” for the roundtable “Teaching with Technology or Technology with Teaching?” NeMLA convention, Boston, 7 March 2020
“Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse in Early Modern Italy,” PHAROS pilot project meeting, The Frick Collection, New York City, 28 February 2020
Poster presentation and digital demonstration of “Art in the Time of Syphilis: A Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita,” Digital Humanities Conference and Colloquium, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 7 June 2019
Pedagogy
“Primary Sources in the Classroom,” Rutgers Online Learning Conference, 15-16 March 2021
“Using Scalar for Italian Research Projects” for the panel “Digital Italian,” NeMLA convention, Washington, DC, 21 March 2019
Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
“Women’s Contributions in Early Modern Italy: Exploring Cultural Production in Art and Printing,” with Daniela Rovida, Symposium “Challenging Empire: Women, Art, and the Global Early Modern World,” Birmingham Museum of Art, 2 March 2024
“Censored and Persistent Editing, abroad: Galileo and Two New Sciences” for the panel “Interpretation and Expression under Duress in the Italian 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries,” MLA, San Francisco, 5-8 January 2023
“Textual and Geospatial Knowledge: Dati’s La Sfera and Mediterranean Portolan Charts” for the panel “The Mediterranean World and Italian Literature, 1200-1600,” MLA, San Francisco, 5-8 January 2023
“Tradizioni umanistiche per idee della scienza tra Rinascimento e periodo moderno” for the panel “L’italiano e la scienza tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: le vie della lingua, della letteratura, dell’arte,” Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano conference “Scienza, arte e letteratura: lingue, narrazioni, culture che si incrociano,” Geneva, 28-30 June 2021
“Early Modern Discussions on Public Health: the 1630 Plague” for the seminar “Plagues and Diseases in Literature,” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) convention, 11 March 2021 (online)
Poster presentation “Dear Galileo: Letters on Astronomy,” Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, 8 January 2021 (online)
“At the Table of the Scientist: An Unusual Galileo” for the panel “Food Is Culture: Taste and Italy,” NeMLA convention, Washington, DC, 22 March 2019
“Seeing and Believing? Natural, Unnatural, and Astronomical Rhetoric in Primo Levi’s Sidereus Nuncius,” Carolina Conference of Romance Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1 April 2017
History of Science and Medical Humanities
“Interpreting Certainty and Uncertainty: Galileo’s Scientific Treatises and Influence” for the panel “Uncertainty in Italian Texts” of the MLA Division of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century Italian literature, MLA convention, 8 January 2021 (online)
“Diet, Weight, and the Authority of Books: Santorio’s Medical Method,” Medical Heritage Library Conference, 13 November 2020 (online)
“The Syphilis Case Study and Narrative Medicine in Early Modern Italy” for the panel “Diseases and Remedies: Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives,” Chiasmi Brown and Harvard Graduate Student Conference “Medicine and the Arts: Co-relazioni,” 23 October 2020 (online)
“Narrating Syphilis in 16th-century Italy” for the seminar “Medical Humanities: Literature, Medicine and the Arts,” NeMLA convention, Boston, 8 March 2020
“Art in the Time of Syphilis: A Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini’s Works” for the panel “Disease and Disability in the Renaissance,” RSA annual meeting, Toronto, 18 March 2019
“Art in the Time of Syphilis: A First-Person Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita,” a poster presentation, “Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy” conference, Monash University, Prato, Italy, 13-15 December 2017
“A Doctor-Patient Relationship Unveiled in Poems: Francesco Petrarca’s Reasons for Disliking Medicine Practitioners,” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 11 May 2017
Communications Lead, Association for Computers and the Humanities, 2023–2024
Invited Advisory Board member in Galileo’s Virtual Library, a Digital Humanities project coordinated by Crystal Hall at Bowdoin College, 2022-2024
Judge in the 2023 University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries Hackathon, Hacking for Harmony, March 31-April 2, 2023
Judge in the 2023 Love Data Week Haiku Contest, University of Notre Dame, 17 February 2023
Social Media Translator on Twitter (English, Italian, and Spanish) at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (Online Edition), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Gale Cengage, 2021-2022
Contributing author for the website Mainly Museums, 2021
Translator of three short stories, “Tutto per bene,” “La buon’anima,” “Senza malizia” from Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) by Luigi Pirandello, in Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, 2022
Nominated for election to the MLA Executive Committee for the LLC for 17th, 18th, and 19th-century in Italian, and New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH) Steering Committee, 2022
Inaugural Advisory Board Member at The Transcription Challenge Framework, 2021-2023
Peer reviewer for The Italianist, a scholarly journal published by Taylor & Francis, November 2021 to present
Peer reviewer for Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook, July- August 2021
#DLFTeach host, with M. Keane and L. Morreale, in Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Twitter chats: “Transcribing Together: Crowdsourcing on Digital Projects,” 20 April 2021
Co-founder and coordinator of a special interest discussion group on IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), 2021
Reviewer for the Aresty Rutgers Undergraduate Research Journal, 2021
Scholar Advisory Group member at the PHAROS pilot project, The International Consortium of Photo Archives, providing feedback on user interface designs and prototypes for a collection of nearly 1.5 million images of early modern artworks and documentation at the Frick Collection; I Tatti at Harvard, Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, and Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 2019-2021
Co-author and curator:
Image du monde Challenge II, a competition to transcribe Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal manuscript 3516, Team Four, 8-22 January 2021
Image du monde Challenge, Team Chantilly, 25 September-9 October 2020
Co-captain, co-author and curator in La Sfera Challenge II for the Yale, Beinecke 946 manuscript, 17-31 July 2020
La Sfera Challenge, Team USA, to transcribe the Yale, Beinecke 328 manuscript, 22 May-5 June, 2020
Storytelling Task Force, Europeana Network Association, 2020-2021
Editor-at-large for Digital Humanities Now, May 2020
Editorial board, peer reviewer, and book reviewer for the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, 2019-2021
Vice President of the Italian Graduate Society at Rutgers University, with responsibilities in planning and organizing lectures and events, fundraising, and editing La Fusta, the oldest graduate journal in Italian Studies in North America, 2018-2019
Cultural projects with the Italian Consulate of New York City, Education Office, in particular at the American Museum of Natural History, 2018
Judge at the Rutgers Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2017-2018
Production Editor of Italian Quarterly, 2016-2017
Judge at the American National Junior Classical League Creative Writing Contest, 2014-2015
“Italian Immigration in the US: Images, Stories, and Songs,” a lecture with guest speakers, Italian-American band Mebanesville, 20 November 2014
Agostini, Caterina. 2024. "Book review of Sherry Roush, Ed. Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino." Annali d'italianistica 42: 578–79.
Agostini, Caterina. 2024. “Review: Digital Humanists’ Orlando Furioso.” Reviews in Digital Humanities V (3). https://doi.org/10.21428/3e88f64f.6d196fba
Review of Robert N. Spengler III, Fruit from the Sands. The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat (2019), Graduate Journal for Food Studies (12 August 2020)
Review of Arielle Saiber, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (2017), Forum Italicum (15 June 2020)
Production Editor for Italian Quarterly, a scholarly journal at Rutgers University, 2017
Editor for the journal La Fusta and co-author of the Italian Graduate Society Call for Papers, 2018-2019
Association for Computers and the Humanities, Women Who Code, Association for Computing Machinery and SIGSPATIAL, the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, National Postdoctoral Association, American Historical Association, Renaissance Society of America, Modern Language Association, Northeast Modern Language Association, Associazione Internazionale dei Professori d’Italiano, Europeana Network Association, and Phi Sigma Iota honor society member
Agostini, Caterina. 2021. Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse in Early Modern Italy. https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-5rjp-ff81
Caterina received the Rutgers Award for Excellence in Outreach and Service from the 2021 graduating class. The award honors excellence in digital humanities research, expertise with digital methods and tools, and exceptional outreach and engagement with diverse audiences in the US and internationally
News shared on https://italian.rutgers.edu/docman-lister/newsletters/224-libretto-2021-newsletter/file
At Rutgers, Caterina served as Teaching and Research Assistant, Lecturer, and Digital Humanities Specialist.
E-mail cagostin [at] iu [dot] edu
ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1695-0433
Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fJGAHeAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
X/Twitter @CateAgostini
Humanities Commons @agostini
GitHub CateAgostini https://github.com/CateAgostini