“There is no history without documents. There are no sources without history. By no means should literacy alone be considered the be-all-and-end-all of history.”
Narrans, mendax, sciens: creating meaning in a world of stories. © 2020 Emiliano Troco
Bio
Leonardo Ambasciano earned his Ph.D. in Historical Studies at the University of Turin, Italy, in 2014, with a cognitive and evolutionary analysis of the ancient Roman female cult of Bona Dea. In 2016, he was Visiting Lecturer in Religious Studies at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
In 2017, he became Managing Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography, after having served as Editorial Assistant since 2014. In December 2021, he relinquishes the editorship and publishes his final JCH Editorial. From April 2022 to March 2023, he was Virtual Visiting Researcher in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Leonardo is the author of An Unnatural History of Religion: Academia, Post-Truth, and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2019), and of various articles, book reviews, and chapters, including “History as a Canceled Problem? Hilbert’s List, du Bois-Reymond’s Enigmas, and the Scientific Study of Religion”, co-authored with T. J. Coleman, III and published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87(2): 366-400.
Research Interests
Leonardo’s research entails the socio-scientific, cognitive, and evolutionary study of religion(s), with a specific focus on ancient Roman cults.
He is also an accomplished historiographer and his academic interests range from method and theory in the History of Religions to the history of the academic concept of shamanism. Most recently, he has critically explored the role of historiography in the development of the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion.
Leonardo advocates a consilient and cross-disciplinary approach to the qualitative study of human beliefs and behaviours in line with current Big History and Deep History paradigms.
Deep Times banner. © 2019-2024 Fabio Manucci, Andrea Pirondini, Leonardo Ambasciano
Blog(s)
Leonardo has been writing posts – and the sporadic third-person presentation – for the better part of the last decade.
If you are interested, you can find some of his past musings and digressions on history and historiography at his old blog, Tempi profondi (“Deep Times”).
You can also flip through his brand new posts (and the occasional re-post) on the current reincarnation of his old blog right here.