Professor Lamia Balafrej has been named the 2025-2026 Berenson Fellow with her project “The Feminized Robot as Palimpest” at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
“This project examines the transhistorical motif of the feminized robot from the vantage point of the early modern Mediterranean. The feminized robot—automated devices that replicate female stereotypes like caregiving or secretarial activities—extends back to ancient literature and continues to inform the latest technologies, including algorithmic assistants like Apple’s Siri. This research will focus on automated serving-women in early modern Italy and their relation to mechanical female slaves in premodern Arabic treatises. The goal is to develop a framework for understanding the Mediterranean circulation of the feminized robot, not simply as the repetition of the same trope, but as an ongoing, figuring palimpsest, made of multiple, heterogeneous layers.”
For more information, please visit: https://itatti.harvard.edu/people/lamia-balafrej
