Freie Universität Berlin
On aesthetic disinterestedness
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
Thomas Hilgers is a research associate at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. His fields of research are aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of film, and German philosophy since Kant. Currently, he specifically focuses on the nature and value of aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments. His monograph on aesthetic disinterestedness will be published by Routledge in 2016.
Web page: http://www.kunstakademie-duesseldorf.de/fachbereiche/kunstbezogene-wisse...
Università di Trento
The emotional body: the expression of emotions in Descartes, Cureau de la Chambre, and Le Brun
2015-2016: Fall
Paola Giacomoni is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Trento. She holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Bologna and collaborates with several Italian and international universities,including the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she was a research fellow in 2011. Her main scientific interests concern the relationship between philosophy, science, and art, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 2003 and 2004 she was the scientific curator of a large exhibition which spanned art and science, about the history of landscape. More recently she has been working on the expression of emotions, starting from Descartes up to the contemporary debate. She has published numerous essays internationally, several edited books, and five monographs, including "Le forme e il vivente. Morfologia e filosofia della natura in J. W. Goethe," Naples, 1993, "Il laboratorio della natura," Milan, 2001, and "Ardore. Quattro prospettive sull’ira da Achille agli Indignados," Rome, 2014.
Web page: http://www5.unitn.it/People/it/Web/Persona/PER0004248#INFO
Università di Palermo
The challenge of cave art: old and new paradigms in aesthetics and visual culture
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
Michele Cometa is Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. He was a visiting professor at many European universities and recently received the Beinecke Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown).
His research focuses on German cultural history and aesthetics (especially in the age of Goethe), literary theory, and visual culture. Recent publications include works on ékphrasis, literature, and visual culture: Descrizione e desiderio. I quadri viventi di E. T. A. Hoffmann (2005); Vedere: Lo Sguardo di E. T. A. Hoffmann (2009); La scrittura delle immagini. Letteratura e cultura visuale (2012); and Archeologie del dispositivo. Regimi scopici della letteratura (2016).
His book on the Triumph of Death fresco in Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo and his first work on the biological meaning of fiction (La letteratura necessaria. Narrazione e biologia)are in press.
At the Italian Academy he will work on the challenge that paleolithic “arts” and the old and new theories on the origin of human symbolic behaviour issue to contemporary visual culture.Web page: http://www.michelecometa.it/
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon
Law, politics, and physiognomy from the 16th to the 18th centuries: a study of Giovanni Ingegneri’s works
2015-2016: Fall
Fellow for the Academy project “Law and its Manifestations”
Manuela Bragagnolo is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire d’Excellence COMOD (Constitution de la modernité) at the University of Lyon (2014-2015) and a member of the research lab Triangle, at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon. She received her Ph.D in Legal Studies and History of Political Thought from the University of Trento in 2009. After her Ph.D studies she received grants for research from the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and from the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation in Geneva. She was Substitute Professor of Christian Latin Language and Culture at the University of Geneva and member of the academic staff of the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation (IHR)(2014-2015). She is member of EMoDIR (Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism) and of Laboratoire Italien‘s editorial staff. She is working on a book on the importance of Italian Renaissance culture in the 18th century, particularly in Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s legal, political and religious thought. Her fields of interest include history of legal, political and religious thought between the 16th and the 18th centuries, as well as history of medicine and physiognomy. Her project at the Italian Academy aims to investigate the links between law and physiognomy in Renaissance Italy.
2015-2016: Spring
Calori & Maillard (Letizia Calori and Violette Maillard) have worked as a duo since 2009. Their collaboration combines a background in architecture (Calori) and film studies (Maillard). In 2011 they obtained an MA in Visual Arts at IUAV, Venice. In 2012 they moved to Frankfurt where they deepened their research at the Staedelschule Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste.
In 2015 they collaborated with the Heinz and Gisela Friederichs Foundation for the project L'Oiseau de Feu, a ballet for tower cranes. In that same year they were selected for a workshop with Julie Mehretu at the Botin Foundation in Santander, Spain.
They have participated in several international shows, both in experimental spaces and institutions, such as MMK, Museum fur Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Villa Iris, Fundacion Botin (Santander), Mousonturm and Deutsche Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), Spreez (Munich), Osterreichische Skulpturenpark (Graz), MAC Lissone (Milan), MAXXI (Rome), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice).
University of California - Berkeley
Blindness, composition, and the conceptualization of music in medieval and early modern Italy
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
I completed a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2015. I am broadly interested in how instrument playing and other everyday modes of experiencing music shape the ways in which musicians conceptualize music and influence the development of musical style. My dissertation, "Keyboard Playing and the Mechanization of Polyphony in Italian Music, Circa 1600," explores the emergence of a keyboard-centric paradigm of music in the late sixteenth century and its role in the development of the "concertato style" in the early decades of the seventeenth century. While at the Italian Academy, I will investigate the role of instruments in the compositional process of blind composers of polyphonic vocal music, particularly the Venetian harpsichordist Martino Pesenti (c.1600-c.1648).
Yale University
Faire un tamtam: timbre, noise, and emotions in 19th-century music
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
Gundula Kreuzer is Associate Professor of Music at Yale University. Her publications and research interests embrace the history and theory of opera (particularly of the “long” nineteenth century), with a special focus on aspects of performance, staging, technology, mediality, and sound; reception history and music historiography; music and politics; music in the Third Reich; German and European cultural history since the late eighteenth century; Verdi and Wagner.
Kreuzer is currently finishing a book called Wagnerian Technologies for the University of California Press, in which she argues that composers since the late eighteenth century increasingly integrated specific stage technologies into their scores to enhance opera’s desired multimedia effects. Her first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), won several awards. Kreuzer also edited Verdi’s instrumental chamber music (The University of Chicago Press and Ricordi, 2010); co-edited a special issue, “Opera in Transition” of The Opera Quarterly (2011); and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Wagnerspectrum.2015-2016
Spring
Francesca Grilli was born in Bologna in 1978. Her work examines the realm of sound processing, in all its forms, registers and multiple implications, expressive and perceptive. Using the language of performance, she moves between private and personal elements and the spectators' space of action, drawing viewers into a boundless space of physical and emotional involvement, often an ambiguous and unsettling territory.
Her poetics, respectively articulated through video and performance, focus attention on the complexity of an intimate story and seek an action of maximum intensity, supported by the element of sound, which she considers the most effective means of communicating directly with the personal and collective unconscious. In recent years, she has worked extensively on language—its metaphors and evocations—particularly in The Conversation (performance, 2010). The search for a completely dematerialized degree of communication, straddling magic and ritual, is the backbone of many of her works, including Moth (2009).Università di Firenze
The emotional impact of color in contemporary cinema: aesthetics, science, and technology
2015-2016: Spring
Federico Pierotti is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florence, where he teaches Film History and Forms of Contemporary Cinema. His book La seduzione dello spettro: Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema (2012) regards color in film history as a central issue to modern media visual culture. Besides his work on color, Pierotti also has an interest in the history of post war Italian cinema, as well as in new wave and contemporary Portuguese films. His writings have been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Interfaces, Bianco e Nero, Fata Morgana, Quaderni d'italianistica and Colore e Colorimetria. He has participated in invitational lectures and international conferences on film, media and color studies. He is part of the editorial board of the academic journal Immagine: Note di Storia del Cinema. He is currently working on a book manuscript which draws upon his research on the emotional impact of color in digital cinema. In January 2014 he qualified to be an Associate Professor.
Web page: http://www.unifi.it/index.php?module=ofform2&mode=2&cmd=1&AA=2013&dip=20...
Université de Genève
What emotions can teach us about music: cognitivism, musical expressiveness and affective responses to music
2015-2016: Spring
Federico Lauria is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences and at the Philosophy Department of the University of Geneva. His main interests are in the philosophy of emotions, at the intersection of philosophy of mind and practical philosophy (ethics and aesthetics). He has recently obtained a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Geneva for his dissertation on desire. He is now working on several topics in philosophy of emotions and related areas, particularly desire, self-deception, character traits, musical emotions, hope, epistemic emotions, and the evil of death. He is also a member of the Center of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Neuchâtel.
At Columbia University, he will explore the relations between emotions and music. He will defend a new theory of musical expressiveness and musical emotions with the help of cognitive theories of emotions, in particular the appraisal theory of emotions that has been developed at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences.Web page: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/collaborateurs/corps-intermediaire/pos...
Fordham University
Prodigious sounds: music and learning in the world of Athanasius Kircher
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
Eric Bianchi is Assistant Professor of Music at Fordham University in New York City. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011. His research examines the intellectual cultures of music in the early modern period. At the Italian Academy he will investigate the musical theories of Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher against the backdrop of upheavals in seventeenth-century scientific and humanistic scholarship.
Web page: http://www.fordham.edu/info/22907/music_faculty_and_staff/5666/eric_bianchi
Universität St. Gallen
The sting of the image
2015-2016: Spring
Emmanuel Alloa is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), as well as Senior Research Fellow at the NCCR eikones and Lecturer in Aesthetics at the Départment d'Arts Plastiques at the University of Paris 8-Saint Denis. He holds a binational Ph.D. in philosophy (Paris I-Panthéon/Freie Universität Berlin). His research has its main focus in Continental philosophy on the one side and Aesthetics on the other, with a special emphasis on the question of images and their powers. Among his book publications: La résistance du sensible. Merleau-Ponty critique de la transparence (2nd edition 2014; Spanish translation 2009, Chinese, Brazilian and English translation forthcoming) and Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie (2011). During his stay at the Italian Academy, he will be working on a book project dedicated to "The Sting of the Image."
Web page: http://www.unisg.ch/en/schools/humanities+and+social+sciences/ueber+shss...
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Iconic normativity: the case of advertising images
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009). Web page: http://cehta.ehess.fr/index.php?682
Københavns Universitet
The body’s eloquence: moving, acting, and dancing on the operatic stage in Florence (1630–1700)
2015-2016: Fall and Spring
Christine Jeanneret is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on Italian music of the Renaissance and Baroque, with a particular interest in performance practices and the staging of early music, the body on stage, as well as the cultural transmission of repertoires. She published one book on the manuscript sources of Frescobaldi’s music, "L’Œuvre en filigrane" (Olschki, 2009), she co-edited three volumes of the Frescobaldi’s Complete Works for Suvini-Zerboni, and has published articles on keyboard music, the Roman cantata, the late madrigal, and opera and gender studies. She is an editor for the new, dynamic edition of Marenzio's Secular Works (MODE) and is currently preparing the critical edition of Cavalli's "Ipermestra" for Bärenreiter.
Web page: http://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk/ansatte/?pure=da/persons/502090
University of Virginia
Giuliano da Sangallo and the ruins of Rome
2015-2016: Fall
Cammy Brothers is Valmarana Associate Professor and Director of the Venice Program at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is the author of Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of ArchitectureYale U.P., 2008), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Prize from The College Art Association and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her research interests and publications focus on relations between architecture and painting, architectural drawing, artistic exchange around the Mediterranean, and the history of Mediterranean cities.
Web page: http://www.arch.virginia.edu/people/directory/cammy-brothers
Sapienza Università di Roma
Structure and function of the SRD5A enzyme family: new targets for schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders
2015-2016: Spring
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Beatrice Vallone, PhD, is a Professor of Biochemistry at La Sapienza Università di Roma and currently a Visiting Professor in the Dept. of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics of Columbia University. Dr. Vallone investigates the structure of proteins to understand their role in human physiology and pathology, in order to set the basis for innovative therapies.
Highlights of her career include having determined the structure of neuroglobin, a protein that plays a crucial role in neuronal protection, and having made substantial contribution to the field of protein engineering for creating blood substitutes and producing new antibiotics.
As a fellow of the Italian Academy she will study testosterone alpha dehydrogenases, a family of membrane-embedded enzymes involved in the production of neurosteroids and in steroid activation. These are promising targets in psychiatry and oncology and an understanding of their structure will help in the design of novel drugs for severely debilitating pathologies.Web page: https://vallonelab.it/people/
Università di Milano
Dreams: an intersection of anthropology, neuroscience, and art
2015-2016: Fall
Arianna Cecconi received her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2008 under the joint supervision of the Università di Milano Bicocca and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and is the author of L'Acqua della paura (Mondadori 2003) and I sogni vengono da fuori (Ed.It 2012). Currently, she teaches Cultural Anthropology at the Università di Milano and is an affiliated researcher at the Idemec (Université d'Aix-Marseille). The main topics of her ethnographic work to date comprise dreams, rituals, memory, violence, and local reconciliation processes. Arianna Cecconi has conducted ethnographic studies focused on these themes in different field sites: the Peruvian Andes, Spain, France, and Italy.
Publication:
2016 « La memoria de los que estaban y de los que no estaban: sueños y visiones en la España contemporánea» in Recostruyendo Memorias en el Triangulo Atlantico, Gunther Dietz & Christiane Stallaert (eds.), Xalapa Edition, Mexico [Forthcoming].Universiteit Antwerpen
Remembering the future: on animal foresight thinking
2015-2016: Spring
Angelica Kaufmann (Milan, 1987) is a Philosopher of Mind interested in the insights that Psychology and Anthropology can provide to contemporary theories on the evolution of the mind. Her research focus is on nonhuman primates' cognition. Angelica will join the Italian Academy as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, with a double appointment at Gottingen University. She will soon complete her doctoral studies at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology of the University of Antwerp, where she has been working with Bence Nanay on a project named "The Origins of Social Cognition." During her PhD she visited Warwick University under the supervision of Stephen Butterfill. She was educated in Philosophy of Mind at The University of Edinburgh and, previously, in Logic and Philosophy of Science at The University of Milan, her hometown.
Web page: https://sites.google.com/site/angelicakaufmann/home