Two fields, one question
My research moves between the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance and the contemporary study of learning and wellbeing. The materials change; the question does not.
The question
Across very different materials, I pursue one preoccupation: the cognitive architectures by which intellectual life is built, defended, and sustained under pressure. The three strands below are distinct in their objects and continuous in their concern.
Renaissance intellectual history
- My Master 1 thesis at the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, supervised by Pascal Brioist, examined the esoteric dimensions of Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts.
- A year at the Università degli Studi di Firenze extended the work toward the history of philosophy and of the book, including Wittgenstein's enquiry into the perception of colour.
- The Venetian Hebdomades of Fabio Paolini, organised around the number seven, I read as an ordering of knowledge devised to hold a fracturing world in place.
- Throughout, my interest rests on the prisca theologia and its kin: the conviction that knowledge rightly arranged could steady both the cosmos and the mind that contemplates it.
Wellbeing and reflective practice in education
- Grounded in my Postgraduate Certificate in Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education.
- Published research on teacher burnout, read not as a private failing but as an erosion of vitality, of purpose, and of the capacity to connect.
- Work on reflective self-care within a profession reshaped by digital demands.
- Drawing on positive education to ask how the conditions of flourishing might be built rather than merely hoped for.
The engineering of distance and adult formation
- Undertaken through a Master in the Sciences of Education and Formation at the Université de Caen Normandie, on the design and conduct of learning at a distance.
- My dissertation concerns the conditions under which young adults develop the competences of professional preparation as they move from secondary education into higher education and into working life, within hybrid and remote settings, and across cultures.
- Situated within the orientations of the CIRNEF laboratory, in particular its work on guidance in open and distance learning and on pedagogy in international contexts.
- Conceived as the preliminary framing of a larger question I hope to carry into doctoral research.
The through-line
Read together, these strands describe a single concern traced across the longue durée: from the Renaissance scholar composing an order against chaos, to the educator studying how the conditions of wellbeing are built, to the designer asking how formation might be sustained across distance and difference. In each case the question is the same. It is a question about the architectures, intellectual, emotional, and institutional, by which a person learns to think clearly and to remain whole.
Published work
- Papers in English and in French on Academia.edu.
- Earlier Renaissance research on my notebook at cgcesr.wordpress.com.
- Essays and a podcast forthcoming, under the name Digited Atelier. See the writing.