At its meeting on 19 June, the Assembly of Academicians of BAS elected Prof. Alessandro Maria Bruni from Italy Foreign Member of the Academy.
Professor Alessandro Maria Bruni was born on 9 September 1978 in Rome. He works in the fields of Byzantine and Slavic palaeography, codicology, textual studies, historical linguistics and hymnography as well as in the field of Kartvelology. He has specialised with some of the most eminent medievalists, such as Prof. Enrica Follieri in Rome and Prof. Boris Fonkich in Moscow. Until 2024, he was a professor at the University of Ca Foscari in Venice, and then at the Oriental University of Naples, today the largest Italian centre for the study and research of foreign languages and cultures. He has lectured in Austria, Bulgaria, Great Britain, Georgia, Italy, Russia, USA, etc. He is currently director of two major projects. One is devoted to the development of texts in the oldest Christian Slavonic manuscript traditions in which the problems of important Old Bulgarian original and translated works, such as the hagiographies of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, “On Letters” by Chernorizets Hrabar, translations into Old Bulgarian of some Old Testament books, etc. are also widely developed. The other is related to the study of Slavonic Cyrillic manuscripts with the help of artificial intelligence.
His great scientific contributions especially in the field of Bulgarian studies can be systematized in four main directions: study of the words of one of the most authoritative medieval authors and Fathers of the Church, Gregory the Theologian (c. 330 – c. 390); study of Old Bulgarian translations of biblical books intended not for liturgical use but for individual reading; study of the earliest hymnographic book known so far which had a wide distribution by the twelfth century in the Eastern Christian world; and the introduction of a hitherto unused methodological approach to the study of Old Bulgarian texts.
