Dr Bartolini is a Classical Archaeologist and Critical Heritage specialist. From the academic year 2024/25, she will be a panel tutor at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, where she will be teaching fascist heritage and its legacies and also teaching classes on fascist heritage for the American University in Rome. She recently completed her Leverhulme Trust Abroad Fellowship based at the Institute for Heritage Science at the Italian National Research Council (ISPC-CNR) while she was a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. She has twice been a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome (DHI), and a researcher for the Places of Fascism project at the Istituto Ferruccio Parri in Italy. She is also a postdoctoral member of the University of Cambridge’s Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, where she obtained her MPhil and PhD. She was an ICCROM 2017 Fellow and ICOMOS Scientific Committee member for the protection of 20th Century Heritage.
Dr Bartolini’s research interest lies in the intersection between heritage, memory and identity and how they inform each other. She is interested in how politics of the past informed national and international cultural policies, with a primarily interest in Fascism and Colonialism and in how museums deal with controversial collections and histories. Her doctoral project, which has been transformed into a monograph (currently under review with Palgrave McMillan), looks at the complex process of heritage formation and exclusion in fascist Italy and how fascist heritage is perceived today. She is currently working on her second monograph based on her Leverhulme Trust Fellowship where she took the Colonial Museum of Rome as a case study to investigate how the regime used heritage to construct a polarized narrative of Italian identity and Otherness.
At the KNIR she will be a History Research Fellow working on the project ‘Lybia mon amour: Balbo, archaeology and the construction of fascist identity’. This project will build upon research undertaken on archaeological data stored at the ex-Colonial Museum in Rome to try and unpack ideology and propaganda behind the heritage-making process of excavation, restoration and display of archaeological remains in fascist Italy.
