{"id":211,"date":"2026-04-25T16:18:47","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T16:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/?page_id=211"},"modified":"2026-04-29T18:06:59","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T18:06:59","slug":"211-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/?page_id=211","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n
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Since the\ndawn of European civilisation, the East has played a central role in shaping\nthe identity of the West, serving both as a myth and as a mirror of its fears\nand utopias. Within this framework, the Eurasian steppe has long been imagined\nby essentially sedentary Europeans as a barbaric, anarchic, and negative realm.\nIt was seen as the land of the Amazons, whose myth embodied unsettling aspects\nof femininity \u2013 such as masculine strength and resistance to male authority \u2013\nrekindling ancestral fears of matriarchy. 
Yet, the\nproliferation of translations and intercultural exchanges in (post)modernity\nlaid the groundwork for moving beyond a reductive Manichean vision of the\nEast\/West relationship. Postcolonial philosophies, in particular, have\nchallenged this binary, fostering a growing awareness of cultural transfer and\nthe complex interplay between Western and non-Western histories. 
In this\ncontext, the rediscovery and translation of indigenous sources, along with\nstudies conducted since the 19th century, have opened new perspectives on\nsteppe civilisations, shaped by the encounter of Eastern and Western\nviewpoints. Once cast as harbingers of the Apocalypse, nomadic empires have\nbeen re-evaluated: admired for their capacity to unite diverse cultures, their\nmeritocratic structures, and their religious tolerance, they are now recognised\nas precursors of modernity and key agents of global history. 
This\nreappraisal extends to steppe women, long confined to distorted representations\nthat likened them to witches or unsettling warriors, indistinguishable from the\nmen of their hordes. In reality, since\nantiquity\nthese women enjoyed greater freedom than their contemporaries in sedentary\nsocieties. Wise\nand\nresilient, they could participate alongside men in warfare, politics, and\ncommerce. They wielded\nconsiderable\ninfluence over their husbands, sometimes ensuring matrilineal succession and\nfostering\nprivileged\nbonds between mothers and daughters.
Nevertheless,\ndespite significant advances in historical and archaeological research \u2013 and\nrepeated scholarly calls to reassess their legacy \u2013 there is still no\ncomprehensive study of the imaginaries these women have inspired. Seeking to\naddress this gap and to open a new field of inquiry, the NOMAD project\ninvestigates representations of steppe women \u2013 from the Amazons to nomadic\nqueens and warriors rooted in historical figures, via fictional characters \u2013 in\nmodern and contemporary literature and the arts (19th\u201321st centuries), both in\nEast and West. It contrasts the external perspective of sedentary peoples with\nthat of the civilisations which are the current heirs of the ancient nomadic\nempires. 
A team of\nspecialists in European and Asian languages and cultures (French, Italian,\nEnglish, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Turkic-Mongolian areas) aims to\nexamine: 
1) the\nchanging perception of steppe women warriors in the Eastern and Western\nimaginaries as a result of the translations and scholarly works carried out in\nthe last three centuries; 
2) the link\nbetween this change and the emergence of feminist claims; 
3) the\npossibility of an Eastern influence, linked to the steppe cultures, on the\nmodel of the emancipated and combative woman dear to the West today. 
To achieve\nthese goals, NOMAD intends to use the tools provided by Digital Humanities:\napplying computational linguistic analysis to the corpus under study and\ncreating a database of digitised texts\nand\nextracts, bibliographic resources, and iconographic material on the subject. 
                                                                                     *<\/b> 
NOMAD (CUP:\nB53C25001750001) has received funding in the amount of \u20ac1 320 365,35 through a\nStarting Grant from the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIS\n2 programme<\/a> (Fondo Italiano per la Scienza). The project is\ncurrently being carried out from 2026 to 2029 at the FORLILPSI Department<\/a> (Formazione, Lingue, Intercultura, Letterature e Psicologia) of the University\nof Florence. Its research areas fall within the ERC fields \u201cSH5 Texts and\nConcepts\u201d and \u201cSH8 Studies of Cultures and Arts\u201d. \n <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n \n \n \n \n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the dawn of European civilisation, the East has played a central role in shaping the identity of the West, serving both as a myth and as a mirror of its fears and utopias. Within this framework, the Eurasian steppe has long been imagined by essentially sedentary Europeans as a barbaric, anarchic, and negative realm. … Continue reading “About”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-211","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234,"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/211\/revisions\/234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nomad-fis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}