Eleonora Volta is a postdoctoral researcher at ArgLab — IFILNOVA, where she is part of a project led by Giulia Terzian on “Communicative Paths to Righting Epistemic Wrongs” (CORES). Prior to joining IFILNOVA, she held a postdoctoral position at San Raffaele University in Milan with a project on “Theory and Methods of Social Philosophy of Language”, led by Claudia Bianchi.
She obtained a Master’s degree in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Milan in 2021 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from San Raffaele University in 2025. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow, under the supervision of Katharine Jenkins.
Her main areas of research and interest are philosophy of language, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, discourse analysis in legal contexts, and sexual ethics. She is particularly interested in the role of misogynistic narratives in shaping public and institutional discourse, and in the identification of counterspeech strategies and ameliorative interventions capable of challenging entrenched misinterpretative frameworks. In her doctoral research, she developed an original analytical framework for the study of the epistemology and pragmatics of rape myths in judicial discourse, which she applied to examine how such myths influence the uptake and assessment of testimonial evidence in Italian criminal trials.
Her work has been published in Social Epistemology, Rivista di Estetica, Phenomenology and Mind, Versus, as well as in edited volumes. One of her publications, “From Silencing to Extracted Testimony in Trials for Gender-Based Violence”, was awarded the 2024 SWIP Italia–Lex Academic Essay Prize for the best feminist philosophy essay authored by an Italian woman philosopher. She has taught gender studies and philosophy of language at the undergraduate level, and she is currently involved in advanced training initiatives for legal professionals, including lawyers and judges, promoted by Italian bar associations and the Italian School of the Judiciary (SSM).
