Sara Agnelli is a classical philologist by training, an interdisciplinary researcher and mentor by profession, and a committed humanist at heart. The recipient of degrees in Classics from the Catholic University in Milan (B.A. 2006, summa cum laude, and M.Phil. 2009), and University of Florida (Ph.D. 2016), she had the good fortune to reinvent herself as a classicist among “The Two Cultures”.
After her doctorate, she taught for both the Classics and the Languages, Literatures and Cultures Departments at UF, where she had the opportunity to expand her scholarship and began working on interdisciplinary research initiatives for the university and beyond. This collaborative focus led to an interest in bridging science and the humanities, from both comparative and international perspectives.
In 2017 she joined Ilaria Capua’s interdisciplinary team at the University of Florida’s One Health (OH) Center of Excellence. In addition to mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, she developed and oversaw a teaching program that envisioned partnerships and interdisciplinary participation in both education and research. Her work has also involved conducting research related to historical perspectives on health and disease, and investigating the intersections between art and science. In an effort to communicate science to a non-expert audience she has been exploring unconventional narrative formats through the language of art, music, and literature.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Sara Agnelli has been particularly involved in promoting the integration of the humanities in medical education through her teaching and research. In this regard, she taught medical humanities courses to pre-med students and she has been mentoring an “interdisciplinary lab” working on a project about “How Are the Arts and Humanities Used in Medical Education at UF College of Medicine?” (IRB202200080).
Sara Agnelli also helped to design a fellowship program (“OH Leonardo Fellowship”) which focused on interdisciplinary research related to the One Health vision developed at UF. Moreover, she co-lead the Sharing Human Experiences (S.H.E.) Talks seminar series, which offered students mentorship from established female professionals of all disciplines by hearing about their experiences.
Among the outreach activities that she performed at UF, she established a fruitful collaboration with the University of Florida College of the Arts. She co-organized a “microscopic” exhibit titled, Pop Microscopy: Bridging Art and Science towards the Future, as part of the initiative Legacies of Leonardo: Celebrating 500 Years of Inquiry at the University of Florida. She was the 2019-2020 Creative Campus Creative Scholar-in-Residence, working closely with Allison Zuckerman on a project about Leonard, Reinterpreted: A new vision of the universal genius from a female perspective. Together, Sara Agnelli and Allison Zuckerman conceptualized a new painting about the “universality” of knowledge from a female perspective and the piece was featured in the University Gallery exhibition “Vitruvian Women”.
She collaborates regularly with the Global Learning Institute at UFIC to implement internationalization in any teaching and research activities.
As a strong advocate for the importance of the humanities in our globalized and complex world, she is very dedicated to creating opportunities for collaboration among people from different fields, within and beyond academia.