Presentation of the Santorio Residential Fellowship

As part of the Santorio Year 2026 in Koper/Capodistria, the Science and Research Centre Koper (ZRS Koper) and the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR), Pisa, will hold a conference to introduce a new international scheme named after Santorio Santorio (1561-1636).

The event will take place on April 15 at 18:00 at the Centre for Venetian History and Cultural Heritage, ZRS Koper, located at Via Krelj 6 in Koper.

The programme will be introduced by Dr Fabrizio Bigotti (CSMBR) and Dr Tilen Glavina (ZRS Koper), who will outline its aims and future development. The event will also feature a lecture by the first Santorio Residential Fellow, Dr Johann Petitjean on the topic of his research: “Public Health Frontiers: Information, Knowledge, and Governance in the Early Modern Adriatic”.

The research of Dr Johann Petitjean explores how public health governance in the Republic of Venice during the early modern period functioned as a critical instrument of statecraft, shaping political authority and territorial control in the Adriatic and Balkan borderlands. He examines the circulation of health-related knowledge, regulations, and epidemic information between Venetian central institutions and peripheral zones such as Dalmatia, Istria, Ottoman Albania and the Greek Islands. Far from being solely an urban policy matter, public health emerges in his work as a deeply political, medical and territorial project, intertwined with diplomatic and imperial strategies. By situating sanitary governance within broader early modern political cultures and epistemologies of the body, his project contributes to the renewal of medical history, revealing how knowledge transcended scholarly circles to become a tool of governance, identity, and power in contested border regions.

Further initiatives planned for the Santorio Year 2026 will also be announced during the event.

The participation is free of charge and is possible in person or via Zoom:

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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84482003021?pwd=wWMwrSc8eSPPguLujxOMKhFKi3DO4b.1

Meeting ID: 844 8200 3021