Invited Speakers

Susan Bassnett is a writer and scholar of comparative literature and translation studies. She is Honorary Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. 

Author of over 20 books, her Translation Studies (4^th edition, 2013), which first appeared in 1980, has remained in print ever since and has become an important international textbook in this field. Her most recent books include Tales of Travellers and Translators (Legenda, 2025), with David Johnston Debates in Translation (2025) and with Piotr Blumczynski Writing Forward (2025)

She is an elected Fellow of the Academia Europaea, the Institute of Linguists and the Royal Society of Literature. Since 2016 she has been President of the British Comparative Literature Association.

Maurizio Ferraris is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he serves as President of the Laboratory for Ontology and of the advanced studies institute “Scienza Nuova”. A columnist for Corriere della Sera and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, he has taught at major universities across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, has authored more than seventy books—translated into several languages—and is the creator of successful television programs.

Over nearly half a century of philosophical work, he has opened new research horizons in six areas: hermeneutics, reframed in terms of its constructive function (History of Hermeneutics, 1988); aesthetics, reconceptualized as a theory of sensibility rather than solely a philosophy of art (Rational Aesthetics, 1997); social ontology, understood as the creation of a world of obligations, relations, and rights through documents (Documentality, 2009); metaphysics, with a renewed defense of realism after the postmodern turn (Manifesto of New Realism, 2012); anthropology, through a conception of the human being as intrinsically technological (Documanity, 2021); and political philosophy, with the proposal of a digital welfare system (Webfare, 2024). He is also responsible for the first philosophical analysis of the mobile phone (Where Are You? Ontology of the Mobile Phone, 2005).

Jacques FONTANILLE, Professor Emeritus of Semiotics at the Centre for Semiotic Research (University of Limoges), is an honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is currently President of the International Association of Semiotic Studies. He published twenty books in the fields of theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, visual semiotics, and general linguistics. His most recent books are: Corps et Sens (2011), Formes de vie (2015), and Ensemble. Pour une anthropologie sémiotique du Politique (2021).

San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at the Columbia University

Alexander Stille is an American author and journalist.

Stille has written several books and numerous articles about Italy's history, culture, and politics, as: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism; Citizen Berlusconi (2006), and a family memoir The Force of Things. His most recent work is The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, published in 2023.