Nicola Carpentieri received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2012 with a dissertation on the Arabic Poetics of Ageing in Medieval Spain and Sicily. Subsequently, he obtained a postdoctoral position at Manchester, UK, where he worked on the history of medicine by editing and studying the Arabic commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. In this project he focused in particular on mental health and psychosomatics in medieval medicine. After Manchester, he won funding (a Beatriu de Pinos Grant) for his own research project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he worked from 2015 to 2017. His project examined medieval Iberian and Sicilian Arabic poetry in juxtaposition, focusing on the transcultural aspects of literary production in these lands. While in Barcelona, he received a tenure-track offer in the US, at the University of Connecticut. Having resolved to return to Italy after two years, he heard about the call for applications for the STARS program at Padua and decided to apply. His project passed, and Nicola got the grant. From the STARS post, he started working on the ERC proposal, which he submitted last year and which, to his delight, has been successful.