SoRS Director

Andrea Maria Nencini earned her Bachelor’s degree in Contemporary History at the University of Florence. Interested in studying the relationship between religious beliefs and the evolution of the brain, she later completed a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science at the University of Trento. During her PhD in History of Religions at Sapienza University of Rome, she worked on a dissertation project concerning the cognitive foundations of habitual meditative exercises in ascetic contexts, using a comparative approach to analyze different religious traditions. In the same period, she completed a postgraduate program in Critical Theory at the University of Florence, deepening her study of the dynamics between power structures and society. She obtained her PhD in 2021 and was subsequently appointed cultrice della materia (subject expert) in History of Religions at Sapienza University of Rome and at the University of Florence.

More recently, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Turin for the PRIN project “Making Korea a Religiously Plural Society? Historical, Legal, and Social Approaches”, where she analyzed transformations in the use of Seon Buddhist meditation in contemporary Korea. She has also taught a course module in “History of Religions” as an adjunct lecturer at the University of L’Aquila, and she currently teaches the course “World Religions” at the Lorenzo de’ Medici International Institute in Florence.

Her research interests include cognitive, evolutionary, and psychological approaches to the study of religious phenomena; the history of the reception of Asian religious traditions in the West; the history of Orientalism; and the contemporary use of Buddhist meditative traditions.