The research team made up by three researchers, Mariangela Albano, Patrizia Serra and Flavio Stochino, intends to promote forms of openness, collaboration and contamination between two different disciplinary macro-sectors which are linguistics and engineering.
Scholars share the same conception of the public role of the academy as an institution at the service of the community and is therefore opposed to excessive sectorialisation, in the belief that the task of linguistic analysis is to understand words and things in a Foucauldian way and to analyze and interpret social processes that continually go beyond and intersect the contents of the different disciplinary sectors and the task of engineering is to dialogue with humanists in order to create local proposals that are the result of theoretical and empirical investigation works. The group's activity, aimed at interpreting the Mediterranean territory (the nature, the transformed & cultured nature and the world of human works - infrastructural and logistics assets), therefore intends to qualify as empirical research, theoretically oriented, open to comparison at national and international level.
Unlike the two macro-sectors, the micro-sectors that affect the group are many and guarantee not only multidisciplinarity but also an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary look.
Mariangela Albano
Principal Investigator
The PI is Mariangela Albano, Associate Professor at the Department of Letters, Languages and Cultural Heritage at the University of Cagliari, where she teaches French Linguistics (discourse analysis, morphology, lexicology, terminology, semantics, language for strategic communication, translation, pragmatics). In her background there are two PhDs: the first, in Language Sciences, obtained in 2014 in co-tutorship at the University of Palermo and University of Burgundy in which she explores topics related to cognitive semantics; the second, in Didactics of the French language, obtained in 2020 at the University Sorbonne nouvelle. In 2013, she conducted some research at the Cognitive Sciences Department of Case Western Reserve University. Between 2013 and 2015 she was Temporary Lecturer in General Linguistics at the University of Burgundy, between 2015 and 2018 she was Assistant Professor in General and French Linguistics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and between 2018 and 2021 she was Associate Professor in French and Italian Linguistics, French and Italian Didactics at the University Dokuz Eylül. In 2009 she participated in the PRIN project Motivations of real tourism in Sicily. Internal mobility and related economic traces (Supervisor: Franco Vaccina, University of Palermo) related to the cultural, geographical, economic and linguistic impact of tourism in Sicily. Since 2022 she has participated in the PRIN National research project For an active citizenship: epistemic authority and trust construction in media discourses (Supervisor: Stefano Vicari, University of Genoa). She is a member of the editorial board and scientific committee of several international associations and of publications related to phraseology and translation (Contexts and Plurality in Phraseology: Didactics, Learning and Translation, 2020 and Repenser le figement : enjeux et perspectives dans l'enseignement du figement Entre apprentissage, didacticité et langues de spécialité, 2021). Her research work is characterized by (i) the diversification of approaches to phraseology (e.g. collocations, locutions, idiomatic expressions), in particular translation studies and translation tools; (ii) the use of contemporary cognitive theories and construction grammars to study foreign language teaching practices (The Role of Corpora and E-lexicography in the Didactics of French Phraseology, 2019); (iii) the study of discourse analysis by a cognitive perspective (Blending et analogie, 2020; Identité, narration, représentation et métaphores: la préface de Dieu d’eau de Griaule, 2020; Wellness Centres on Costa Crociere Cruises: Body, Space and Representation from an Anthropological and Linguistic perspective, 2017). She has thus combined the use of semantic-cognitive theories in the field of translation and teaching practices with the analysis of specialized languages and literary, tourism and media discourse.
Patrizia Serra
Patrizia Serra is Assistant Professor (RTDb) at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture at the University of Cagliari (Italy) where she teaches Fundamentals of Transportation. She holds a MSc degree in Transport Engineering and in 2014 she received her PhD in Transportation Economics from the University of Palermo. Her main research interests are in Sustainable Mobility and Transportation Systems, Maritime Networks Design, Land and Maritime Logistics, Human Factors and Simulation in Transportation Systems, and Transportation planning.. Her research appears in several case studies, books and peer-review international journals. Since 2014, she has been working on several European and cooperation projects as responsible for technical project management and providing her technical-scientific support in project design (ENI, INTERREG, PON, PRIN and PNRR programs). Among the most important projects stands out the technical coordination of the Easylog and Iside projects (Interreg IT-FR Maritime 2014-2020) concerning innovation and safety in the port and transport sectors, and the project "TECHLOG - Technological Transfer for Logistics Innovation in Mediterranean area” aimed at strengthening the links between the academic world and the transport industry through joint technology transfer initiatives aimed at achieving common quality standards for port and road haulage personnel in the Euro-Mediterranean area (Italy, Egypt , Lebanon, Tunisia). Between 2020 and 2021 she was PI of the local unit of the University of Cagliari in the projects OMD (Dangerous goods observatory) and "TDI RETE LNG" (Interreg IT-FR Maritime 2014-2020) with the aim of identifying common solutions and integrated systems for the management of dangerous goods and the distribution of LNG in the ports of the cross-border area. The research activity carried out concerned the definition of a new model for the distribution of LNG by sea and the assessment of its environmental impact.
Flavio Stochino
The third component of the team is Flavio Stochino, Assistant Professor of Structural Analysis and Design (RtDB) ICAR/09 at University of Cagliari, department of Civil, Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR).
He defended his Ph.D. thesis (“Flexural models of reinforced concrete beams under blast load”) in March 2013 at the University of Cagliari. Then he obtained the research associate position at DADU (University of Sassari) within the research project “Structural Models for flexible structures” under the supervision of Prof. Emilio Turco. Then he worked at Technische Universität Dresden - Institut für Statik und Dynamik der Tragwerke under the supervision of Prof. Michael Kaliske as Post Doc Researcher in 2016. He has been R&D Manager of Secured Solutions srl from 2017 to 2018. His scientific research deals with the sustainability of reinforced concrete structures and with the structural behaviour under extreme loading conditions. The research fields can be summarized in: - Recycled Concrete and sustainable materials: experimental and numerical activities on the structural behaviour of concrete with recycled aggregates, mortar reinforced with jute fibers; - Blast and impact loading on structures; - Fire design of reinforced concrete structures. All the topics are developed according with experimental, theoretical and codes applications. He has contributed to different research project related to the Mediterranean area: ReLUIS-DPC 2022-2024 -WP5 – Rapid, low-impact and integrated retrofit interventions; PRIN Smart Monitoring for Safety of Existing Structures and infrastructures(S-MoSES).