Principal Investigator
Giovanni Varelli is Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology of the University of Pavia (IT). Giovanni Varelli studied at the Universities of Pavia and London, and received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Between 2016 and 2022 he was Prize Fellow at Magdalen College and Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music of the University of Oxford. Giovanni Varelli was Visiting Fellow at the Universities of Würzburg and Regensburg, and was recently a Fellow of the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance, and an EU–Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Trento.
Co-Principal Investigator
Since 2007, Emma Hornby has been Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, where she teaches medieval music and directs the Schola Cantorum. She has led multiple externally-funded research projects on medieval chant and liturgy, especially on the Old Hispanic rite. Her collaborative publications engage with musical analysis, chant palaeography, music and theology, and devotional culture in the middle ages.
Research Fellows
Alessandra Ignesti obtained a PhD in musicology from McGill University (2022). She held post-doctoral positions at KU Leuven and the University of Oslo; she collaborates on Cantus Index and Cantus Database. With Remi Chiu (Johns Hopkins University), she is curating the complete edition of the Masses by Ippolito Baccusi (A-R Editions).
Evina Stein obtained a PhD in Medieval Studies from Utrecht University (2016). She held post-doctoral positions at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. She has studied medieval annotation symbols, Isidore of Seville, Latin glosses, early medieval manuscript fragments, and assembly cues. She published a monograph on annotation symbols used in early medieval West, a database of early medieval manuscripts of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, and a digital edition of glosses to this work.
Patrick Sebastian Marschner studied at the Technische Universität Dresden and obtained his PhD at the University of Vienna. He worked as a post-doc at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses mainly on medieval historiography, especially Carolingian as well as Christian-Iberian chronicles and annals, their textual relations and their manuscript transmission. Furthermore, he is interested in historical geography and cosmology as well as the history of thought, especially typological thinking in the Middle Ages.
Giovanni Cunego obtained a Bachelor’s degree (2018), a Master’s degree (2020), and a PhD (2024) in Musicology at the University of Pavia. He also received a Diploma in Composition at the Conservatory of Music in Verona (2020). His research focuses mainly on liturgical-music codicology, neumatic notations, and the history of music in Christian rites. He published the critical edition of Missarum atque sacrarum cantionum novem vocibus. Liber tertius by Antonio Mortaro («Corpus Musicum Franciscanum» – Centro Studi Antoniani Editions). He is a member of the central editorial board of the bibliographical bulletin Medioevo Musicale (Fondazione Ezio Franceschini). He was a Visiting PhD student at the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT) of Paris-Aubervilliers.
Research Associates
Marcus Jones
Paul Rouse (Bristol)
Doctoral Students
Francesco Orio obtained a Master's degree in Musicology from the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya and a Master's degree in Jazz Piano from the Conservatorio “G. Nicolini” of Piacenza. Additionally, he earned a Master's degree in Industrial Biotechnology and a Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology from the Università di Pavia. He served for one year as a researcher at CESEM – Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music at FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, where he worked on and contributed to the Portuguese Early Music Database. His research primarily focuses on neumatic notations and the transmission of the Roman-Frankish musical repertoire in the Iberian Peninsula during the transition of liturgical rites.
Sara Vrdoljak obtained an integrated undergraduate and graduate degree in Musicology at the University of Zagreb Academy of Music (2019–2024). During her studies, she spent the 2023/24 academic year on an exchange at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn. After defending her master’s thesis in October 2024, she began a six-month traineeship on the Scribemus project at the University of Pavia (Cremona). From April 2025, she continued her work there as a PhD student, focusing on neumatic notation of central Italy.
Collaborators
Gionata Brusa (Würzburg)
Former Members
Emily Wride