Giulia Maria Paoletti is a FWO postdoctoral fellow in the Greek Section of the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. She completed her PhD in Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University in 2020. From August 2019 to January 2020, she worked as a pre-doctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, contributing to the project "Byzantine Poetry in the Long Twelfth Century (1081-120)," funded by the FWF (project: P28959, 01.10.2016–30.09.2020). Later, she returned to Vienna as an Ernst Mach postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (February–June 2022). Most recently, she was a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (2023–2024).
Her current project aims to investigate byzantine paraenetic poetry in the Palaiologan Period (1204-1453), through an in-depth study of its socio-cultural and literary value, its readers, and its connection to monastic and non-monastic environments, seeking to understand its Sitz im Leben and the transformative potential of such literature in late Byzantine ethical and moral thought. It focuses on the texts, their genre, their literary tradition, and the relationship between paraenesis and society. The significance of this project lies in its capacity to illuminate how literature can act dynamically on the reader, actively extending their possibilities as subjects of action, cognition, and affect.