Federica Cavaletti

Università di Milano (Italy)

Visiting Scholar

Transformative gazes: meeting the other's eyes in virtual reality 

2021-2022: Fall

Federica Cavaletti, a Visiting Scholar at the Academy, is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan, within the ERC-funded project “An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images” (AN-ICON). Her research spans across aesthetics, media studies, and the cognitive sciences, and it combines theoretical and empirical methods (mostly qualitative ones). Currently, she is working on the first-person experience of virtual reality environments. More in detail, she is focusing on the dynamics of the gazes implied in these environments, also in relation to the applications of virtual reality in professional domains such as psychology, psychiatry, and medicine.

Before becoming part of the AN-ICON project, Federica obtained her Ph.D. degree in Humanities (curriculum: Communication, Media, and Performing Arts) at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan. The topic of her dissertation was time perception in audiovisual media, which she also explored by means of a particular qualitative method (micro-phenomenological interviews). In addition to having published several papers in international journals, Federica is the Italian translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics.