Marta Benenti

Consorzio FINO (Filosofia del Nord Ovest; Italy)

Aesthetic experience and sensory imagination

2019-2020: Fall

Marta Benenti received her PhD in Philosophy in 2018 from the FINO Consortium (Universities of Turin, Eastern Piedmont, Genoa and Pavia). During her PhD she has been a visiting student at the philosophy departments of Glasgow, Bochum and Antwerp and was awarded a DAAD fellowship at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (2018) for a research project on infants' discriminatory capacities of affective cues. She is now a teaching assistant at the University of Eastern Piedmont and is currently working on the publication of her thesis. 

Her areas of interest are philosophy of the mind and aesthetics, and she is particularly interested in the interplay between perception, emotions and imagination in the experience of expressive qualities. 

During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will investigate the role of "sensory imagination" in the experience of artworks, working at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive sciences. She will test philosophical accounts of gestural, affective and metaphorical properties against psychological evidence and the historical and critical background of selected artworks.

Web page: https://unito.academia.edu/MartaBenenti