Golden Dandelion Award for Damiano Benvegnu

The School of Modern Languages' is pleased to announce that Dr Damiano Benvegnu has been awarded one the University's 2025 Golden Dandelion Awards for Excellence in Sustainable Development Education. Damiano is a Reader in the School's Department of Italian and joined the School of Modern Languages in 2023.

Damiano received the award for his module IT4034 (Italian Ecologies). The module looks at how Italian writers, visual artists, and philosophers have engaged with real and fictional environments and how their engagements reflect, critique, and animate the approach that Italian culture has had toward the physical environment and its ecology since late antiquity.

Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the modules explores topics including climate change, environmental justice, animal ethics, and the potential relationships between socio-environmental degradation and epidemics. Students develop their understanding of how Italian ecological narratives fit within the current transnational debate occurring in the field of environmental humanities - learning how Italian culture has shaped contemporary environmental thought and how Italian authors are developing unique ecological approaches to raise questions about the role of humans in a possible post-natural world.

About the Golden Dandelion Awards

Like the dandelion, which provides sustenance for pollenating bees when few other flowers are around, the Golden Dandelion Awards recognise modules that seed, nourish, and disseminate sustainability in the curriculum.

Learn more about sustainability in the curriculum at St Andrews.