Waterlines Thesis Award for PhD holder Federica Marulo
How can historic military systems be preserved in metropolitan areas? This, in a nutshell, is the subject of Federica Marulo's award-winning research. She recently received the Waterlines Thesis Award for her doctoral thesis.
For her research, Federica Marulo compared the approach to military heritage in Italy and the Netherlands with the two case studies of the Entrenched Field of Mestre and the New Dutch Waterline. In both, water played a central role. After looking at the history of landscape protection in both countries, archival research, interviews and field observations were used to compare approaches in the recent past.
Nature, culture and heritage conservation
Although the need to address the interlinkages between nature and culture has become a hot topic in the field of heritage conservation, military landscapes have been almost completely left out of this discussion. An interesting connection is made between culture and nature in her research and a successful comparison is made between how that connection is adressed in Italy and in the Netherlands.
Jury verdict
Taking all aspects of the assessment together, the jury judged this thesis to be the best. The jury consisted of Henk van de Boomgaard (Menno van Coehoorn Foundation), Wim Adriaansen (Dutch Association for Military History) and René Ros (Knowledge Center Waterlinies).
More information
- Federica Marulo received her PhD in 2022 with her dissertation 'At the crossroads of Architecture and Landscape, Preservation Strategies of Historic Military Systems: a Comparison between Italy and the Netherlands' and can be downloaded here.
- Nowadays, Federica Marulo is working at the University of Groningen.
- The Waterline Thesis Prize was established in 2020 and was awarded for the first time in 2021.