Mara Santi, Modern Literature and Arts

International Spring School: a great way to make the solemn words about 'student-teacher engagement' and 'collaboration between colleagues', which I see embroidered in the brochures of every corner of the academic world, come true (Nuovità, n. 25)

Having obtained a classical high school diploma in Varese, Mara entered the Collegio Nuovo by enrolling in Modern Letters in 1992: among the inaugural events of the College's cultural season also the meeting with Rosetta Loy, a writer presented by Carla Riccardi, a professor at the University of Pavia whom Mara will have the opportunity to know well in the years to come not only for the numerous meetings in the College with writers, from Francesca Sanvitale to Daniele Del Giudice, Paolo Maurensig and Ernesto Ferrero.
Since the first year Mara has collaborated in the construction of the film archive (inaugurated by Bruna Bovolenta), also organizing internal film clubs; she also participates in the meeting with Pupi Avati (introduced by the cinema historian Lino Peroni, with whom Mara will brilliantly pass an exam) and in the following years she is also Dean of Students for two terms: paired with the biologist Chiarastella Feder, first, and with Paola Lanati (CTF) then. An experience which in both cases gives the measure of the richness and potential of collegiate life, with the awareness of the difficulties of mediation in such a heterogeneous environment, experienced however as an important training ground for soft skills.
In her second year, Mara took the opportunity of the Ferienkurs of the University of Heidelberg offered to the students of the Collegio Nuovo (she will return again, after graduation, with her husband!); the following year it was her turn to take the advanced course in German language and culture at the University of Mainz. You still can't imagine how all this, thanks to her College, will come in handy!

The course of study at the University of Pavia seems to end with Prof. Carla Riccardi who signs as supervisor the thesis on the Notturnoby poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. Mara immediately seizes the opportunity of the newly created Master's Degree in Media Science and Technology, directed by Prof. Virginio Cantoni and promoted, together with the College, by the IUSS, which will become an accredited University High School in 2005. She wins a scholarship and for that period moved to the brand new Graduate Residence of the College. In those classrooms she doesn't yet know that a little more than fifteen years later she will return... in a different capacity. 
After the Master's degree and three years of work in the company, a change of heart and an opportunity: she won the Doctorate in Modern Philology in Pavia, where she obtained the title in 2004, the year after her marriage. To continue her academic career, Mara has to move. At that point the German of Heidelberg and Mainz comes in handy, because the universities where she will continue her research are first that of Basel (where she had already arrived during her doctorate period), then that of Zurich. These are not easy times, with a family that grows with the arrival of a little girl and... another one on her way!

Another change, after Switzerland, and in a country with not one, but three languages ​​to get by with: Flemish, French and German. Since 2008, Mara has been an Associate Professor at the University of Ghent and subsequently the first Italian to head a Department in the same University: today she is a Full Professor, with new projects in South Korea too! Accustomed to managing relationships with universities and cultural institutes in different countries, Mara finds it easy to contact her Collegio Nuovo when it comes to setting up a new project: «And it goes without saying that it is to the Nuovo that I turn knowing – as in fact it was – that I would find there the availability, the structure, the cultural and academic support and, damn greed, also the human context suitable for an initiative of this kind. Thus a pilot project begins: the “International Spring School, Pavia 2014, Investigations on 900th century literature between popular culture and society”. I gathered a handful of brave colleagues [...] I pocketed the support of the University of Pavia [...] and we began, out of caution, with very few students on which to carry out the first experiment. Chance, or destiny, wants only girls to participate in the project [...] Everyone puts in what they have: a bit of Dutch funds, a bit of Belgian money, a few pennies from their own pockets, the College also gives us the impossible and off we go. The rest is news: seven universities involved, twenty-four hours of lessons in five days, conferences and meetings with authors [...] visits to libraries (Pavia and Milan) and to the Manuscript Center of Pavia. Data aside, the experiment was successful and was a great way to make the winged words about student-teacher engagement and collaboration between colleagues whose brochures I see embroidered in every corner of the academic world come true" (Nuovità, n. 25).
In 2020 she was appointed Knight (“Order of the Star of Italy”) by our President of the Republic upon the proposal of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (in the photo, above, with Ambassador Elena Basile).

Tenacity when you believe in the goodness of a project: «Perhaps in Shanghai [Academic Ranking of World Universities, Editor's note] they won't take it into account, but we with the spirit of "duuwtje in de rug" ["nudge from behind", Editor's note] we will organize more and more spring schools… » (Nuovità, n. 25)