Research Centre:
The Khalili Research Centre
Current Projects:
Principal Investigator: UNSEEN, Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European Encounter with Islamic Material Culture (1580–1700)
Background:
Federica is a historian of the material and intellectual exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods. She is interested in how things, people, and ideas moved across Central Asia and the Mediterranean and were adopted and adapted in new cultural contexts with a particular focus on Islamic art and scientific instruments. She is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project UNSEEN, Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European Encounter with Islamic Material Culture (1580-1700), which investigates the role of slavery in the transmission of things and knowledge from the Islamic world to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her monograph, Islamic Objects in Seventeenth-Century Italy: Ferdinando Cospi, the Bologna Collection and the Medici Court (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), focuses on the collection of Islamic art gathered in Bologna in the seventeenth century and the mercantile, collecting, and gift-exchange networks that shaped it.
Federica received her PhD jointly from SOAS and the Warburg Institute in 2018. She was doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and Koç University in Istanbul (ANAMED), and postdoctoral fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She worked for several years in a curatorial capacity at the University of Oxford – at the Ashmolean Museum (2018-20) and History of Science Museum (2020-23) – and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research has been supported by the Royal Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the Iran Heritage Foundation, and the Delmas Foundation.
Research Interests
Islamic art in Europe; cross-cultural exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe; history of collecting; astronomical instruments from the Islamic world; astrolabes and celestial globes; Islamic metalwork; the circulation of technologies and decorative vocabulary across central Asia and the Mediterranean.
Other Links:
https://unseen.web.ox.ac.uk/people/federica-gigante
https://krc.web.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-federica-gigante
https://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/people/federica-gigante/
