Adjunct Professor in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Bologna since the Academic Year 2018/2019, Valentina is particularly interested in the study and analysis of the Egyptian New Kingdom pottery, as well as cultural and economic exchanges between Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age. Part of her research also focuses on Egyptian Western Desert land route trade connections.
Valentina obtained her MA in Classics from the University of Bologna in 2006 and her PhD in Archaeology, from the same University, in 2010. She got a one-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Bologna in 2011-2012. She then obtained a Marie Curie Intra European Post-Doctoral Fellowship (Project TRADES 326693), which she carried out at the University of Liverpool (UK) between 2014 and 2016. From 2017 to May 2020 she worked as Project Curator (Amara West Ceramics) at the Department of Egypt and Sudan, British Museum (London). From September 2020 to August 2022 she worked as "Foreign Scientific Member" at the Ifao (Institut français d’archéologie orientale), Cairo. She was also appointed "William Kelly Simpson Visiting Professor in Egyptology" at the American University in Cairo (September-December 2021) and represented the British Museum in the European Project "Transforming Tahrir", dedicated to the redisplay of some portions of the permanent collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (June 2021-June 2022). Since September 2022 she has been working as fixed-term Researcher at the Ifao, Cairo, in the framework of the project "Céramothèque".
Beside her academic research, Valentina is also involved in several fieldwork projects in Egypt: Saqqara (New Kingdom Necropolis), Amarna and Quesna. Additionally she worked at the following sites: Valley of the Kings (KV10), Amara West (Sudan), Nabasha, Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, Qantir-PiRamesse, Gurob, Kom el-Ahmer, Bakchias, Asyut and Coptos.
