I obtained my Ph.D. at INALCO (Institut Nationale des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) with a dissertation on the Be'ur Sefer ha-Shir, the Hebrew translation of Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics. My researches focus on the reception of Hellenistic aesthetics into Arab and Jewish medieval philosophy and the participation of Arabs and Jewish intellectuals to the ancient debate on the place of aesthetics and poetical arts in the education of citizens and in politics. Particular attention is given to the Jewish philosophical discussions on the epistemological background of the art of rhetoric and poetry which are disseminated in several philosophical treatises, biblical commentaries, grammars, and encyclopedic works. I am very much interested in both the theoretical understanding of the imaginative faculty in its relation to the internal and the external senses and its practical counterpart. If carefully and properly cultivated, imagination was perceived as conducive to the ethical development of man and to communal-political progress. For this reason, Scriptures, ethical literature, and poetry were perceived as the perfect tools for internalizing practical knowledge and shaping the individual and collective imaginaire. I am also interested in the creation of the Hebrew philosophical language (the so-called lashon ha-metarghemim ''the language of the translators'') as a process developed within the medieval translations from Judeo-Arabic and from Arabic into Hebrew as it took form in Islam and in the Mediterrenean area from the 10th up to the 15th century.
My studies include as well the developments of Jewish poetry in Israeli poetry. I am interested especially in 30th-70th Israeli poetry looked by the perspective of its continuity and distance with the Jewish traditional poetics and its multifaceted aesthetic canons rooted into Judaism, Sefardic poetry and European culture. I translate modern poetry from Hebrew into Italian and few collections already appeared in different Italian journals of poetry and literature.

I was a post-doc fellow at the University of Haifa with a project on ''Ancient Aesthetics in Medieval Jewish Philosophy: Between the Greco-Arabic and Latin Cultures''.
The main goal of my project: to reveal the impact of ancient aesthetics on medieval Jewish philosophy by focusing on the emergence of notions such as “beauty”, “imitation” (Gr. mimesis; Ar. muḥākā; Heb. ḥiqquy) and “human felicity” (Gr. eudaimonia; Ar. saʿāda; Heb. haṣlaḥa), in the 13th 14th-century Jewish philosophical literature. These notions were perceived as playing a crucial role in the intellectual and spiritual construction of the individual and of society at large. The translation from Arabic into Hebrew of the Arabic philosophical corpus, and Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle in particular, played a very important role: they enabled Jewish philosophers to enhance the original reflections already existing in Jewish ancient and medieval literature combining them with the Arabic sources and so to participate in the ancient debate on the place of aesthetics and poetical arts in the education of citizens and in politics.

Francesca Gorgoni is senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University. Her PhD focused on reception of the Arabic commentary tradition on Aristotle’s Poetics in Jewish medieval philosophy. Her research focuses on the comparative and contrastive study of Arabic, Latin and Jewish medieval philosophy on the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought. Her interests include the place of dialectics - rhetorics and poetics in particular - in the philosophical inquiry; the relation between dialectics, noetic and metaphysics; the making of the Jewish medieval thought, through the translations of a multifaceted corpus of writings, from Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Latin into Hebrew, and the legacy of this corpus in the early modern times. She works on the rise and spread of the Humanistic culture in several complementary geographical areas, in the East and in the West, with a special attention to the circulation of ancient philosophy from the medieval Islamicate world and Europe, up to the Italian Renaissance.

She is currently part of the European ANR-DFG project on “Moses mi-Rieti and his Miqdash Me’at”, in which she is editing the so called “scientific cantos” of the poem. She is also coordinator for the Hebrew side in the project Aristotle’s Poetics from the East to the West, directed by Dimitri GUtas (yale University) and Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin).

Beside her research activities she is involved in projects enhancing the translation of Israeli poetry into Italian.