Laura Follesa is postdoctoral researcher (RTD-A) at the University of Cagliari, working on the project SchellingSLEEP, funded by the Italian Minister of University and Research through the “Young Researchers” call, SoE (Seal of Excellence) line. The project, which was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission in 2023 under the Global Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-GF), focuses on the topic of “sleep” in the work of F.W.J. Schelling.

She obtained her PhD in Philosophy in 2014 from the University of Cagliari (supervisor Prof. F.M. Crasta) and the Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena (supervisor Prof. Olaf Breidbach) with a dissertation on the reception of Emanuel Swedenborg’s natural philosophy in eighteenth-century German thinkers such as Schelling and Herder.

From 2017 to 2019 she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, where she led the project TIM-Adrastea on Johann Gottfried Herder and the concept of “thinking in images”, exploring the role of images and the intersections among science, philosophy, and religion (Denkbilder. Analogia e immagini nel pensiero di Johann Gottfried Herder, 2023).

From 2020 to 2023, she was a member of the ERC Starting Grant project PROTEUS, first at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and then at the University of Milan. Her research focused on the reception of Plato’s Timaeus in the modern period, with particular attention to the notion of enthusiasm in the origins of the Platonic philosophy (Sullo spirito della filosofia platonica, 2022). Together with Prof. Silvia De Bianchi and Dr. Laura Marongiu, she also co-created and edited the digital archive Timaeus and Its Legacy.

In 2023-2024, she was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan and a member of the COSMOS research group, where she worked on cosmological and astronomical conceptions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany ("Cosmology, Astronomy, and Philosophy around 1800", HOPOS 2022).