INTernal Members

FABIO ACCA

Fabio Acca is curator, critic and scholar in the performing arts. From 2001 to 2022 he has carried out teaching and research activity at the Department of Music and Theatre Studies (now Departiment of Arts) at the University of Bologna. In 2020 he obtained the national scientific habilitation as associate professor in performative, musical, cinematographic and media arts. In 2022 he was ricercatore di tipo B at the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences at the University of Turin, where he teaches Social theatre. He published articles, essays, monographs and edited volume in a spectre of interests mainly centered on historical and social aspects of New Theatre and New Dance in Italy, on performative implications of popular music and on the relations between theatre, performance and phonographic production in Italy. Since 2014 he is artistic co-director of TIR Danza.

silvio alovisio

Silvio Alovisio, Full Professor of Cinema and Audiovisual Communication at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin, where he coordinates the Media, Music, and Performing Arts section, is Vice President of the Bachelor's Degree Program in Communication Sciences and President of CIRCe (Interdipartmental Research Center on Communication). His prevailing research interests are the cultural and social history of Italian silent cinema, the relationship between cinema ant the sciences of the mid, the history of film audiences, film theory from its origins to 1930, and the stylistic forms of modern and contemporary cinema. He has published many studies in books and journal (including Wong Kar-wai, 2009; L'occhio sensibile, 2013; Giovanni Pastrone, 2015; La scuola dove si vede, 2016). He is a member of the editorial board of the journals "Immagine. Note di storia del cinema" e "La valle dell'Eden".

GIACOMO ALBERT

Giacomo Albert is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Turin. He is member of the steering committees of the Italian Musicological Society (SIdM), and of the Italian Association for Music Informatics (AIMI). Together with Laura Zattra he coordinates the research group "RiSME digitali" and the workgroup on "Digital cultures and technological innovation" of the Italian Association of University Music Professors (ADUIM). His main research topics are XXth and XXIst centuries music (particularly creative process, compositional structures, and the relationship between technology and musical thought), music and intermedia (particularly sound art, multimedia art, sound design, sound and music in videoart, mainstream and experimental cinema), and the representation of music, drama, and melodrama through digital ontologies.

paolo barbieri

Paolo Barbieri is a PhD student in Neuroscience at the University of Turin and currently works in the Brain Plasticity and Behavioural changes (BIP) group at the Department of Psychology. Paolo is also a second-year student at the International Institute of Gestalt Psychopathology and Psychotherapy, located in Turin. Paolo's research focuses on the relationship between aesthetic experience, uncertainty, learning, and the different epistemic emotion that are usually involved in the encounter between the agent and the entropic sensory context, such as anxiety and curiosity. His works in empirical aesthetics, framed within the predictive coding theory, attempt to combine his expertise in neuroscience, psychology, and psychotherapy.

Maria ida bernabei

Maria Ida Bernabei is researcher at the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Turin, where she teaches Cinema and Visual Culture. Previously, she was assegnista di ricerca at the University of Udine within the project "Ephemera e cinema italiano" and the PRIN projects "Modi, memoria e culture della produzione cinematografica italiana (1949-1976)" and "Per una storia privata della critica cinematografica italiana". She worked on the avantgarde reception of scientific cinema (Un'emozione puramente visuale. Film scientifici tra sperimentazione e avanguardia, 2021) and on Italian documentary of the regime (La linea sperimentale. Un percorso di ricerca attraverso quarant'anni di cinema documentario italiano, 2013). Her contributions have been published in edited volumes and Italian and international journals. Her research focuses on visual culture, cultural history of cinema, specialized and non-theatrical cinematographies. She is a member of the Project board of "Film Forum. International Film and Media Studies Conference" and trainer in the framework of the Piano Nazionale Cinema and Immagini per la Scuola.

Alessandro Bertinetto

Alessandro Bertinetto (Personal website | Academia | Unito) is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Turin and the scientific coordinator of ART. He has been visiting scholar at the Universities of Madrid (Complutense and Autónoma), Murcía, Toulouse, Kanazawa, Luxembourg, FU Berlin, Valencia, Belo Horizonte. His research interests include German Idealism, aesthetics, hermeneutics, philosophy of music, creativity and improvisation. His research is now mainly focussing on the topic of "aesthetic habits". From 2012 to 2018, he has been member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Aesthetics.

MICHELA BLOISI

Michela Bloisi is a PhD student at the Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium (FINO), University of Turin. Her research interests interweave pragmatist aesthetics, philosophy of dance, phenomenology and theories of embodiment. Her doctoral project is devoted to improvisation in dance and its political relevance.

franca bruera

Franca Bruera is Full Professor of French Literature at the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Turin. An expert of Apollinaire (Teatro, Bulzoni 2020; Métamorphoses d’Apollinaire, « Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France », 1/2021, Apollinaire & Cie, Bulzoni 1991), she oriented her studies to the European historical avantgards (Le Troisième Sexe des avant-gardes, Classiques Garnier, 2017, B. Cappa Marinetti, Romans expérimentaux, Classiques Garnier 2022), also in a gendered perspective, literary plurilinguism (Ecrivains en transit, « Cosmo » 2017, Plurilinguisme et Avant- gardes, Peter Lang, 2011), Libanese poetry of French expression, contemporary French and Québécuoise fiction, biographical writing and biophiction (Biomythologies contemporaines d’auteur, Classiques Garnier, 2000), epistemology of myth re-writing in 20th and 21st centurt theatre (Le mythe mode d’emploi, « Interférences littéraires », 2015), the notion of risk in literature (Progetto Prin 2022 e Déclinaisons du risque : pour une archéologie des imaginaires littéraires des XXe et XXIe siècles, “Cahiers de littérature française, n.22, 2023).

carlo capello

Carlo Capello is Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences of the University of Turin. Besides investigating contemporary capitalism in a critical and militant anthropological perspective, he is interested in the links between anthropology, philosophy and literature. Among his publications: Ai margini del lavoro. Un'antropologia della disoccupazione a Torino (Ombre corte 2020) and Illuminazioni etnografiche. Walter Benjamin e l'antropologia (a cura di, Ombre corte 2023).

gaetano chiurazzi

Gaetano Chiurazzi is Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin and a Project Director at the Collège International de Philosophie (2019-2025). He has conducted research in Berlin, Heidelberg, Paris, Oxford, Warsaw, and Freiburg i.B. His work focuses on philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, German classical philosophy, and contemporary philosophy. His research explores the ontological implications of language theories, translation philosophy with ethical-political dimensions, aesthetics, and the philosophy of economics. Recently, his studies have centered on the concept of "second nature," examining the interplay between human constructs (habits, institutions, culture) and nature, with a focus on prehistoric artifacts and art. This inquiry extends to digital technologies and their philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic implications. Chiurazzi’s books include Scrittura e tecnica (1992), Hegel, Heidegger e la grammatica dell’essere (1996), Modalità ed esistenza (2001), Il postmoderno (2002), Teorie del giudizio (2005), L’esperienza della verità (2011), Dynamis. Ontologia dell’incommensurabile (2017), and Seconda natura. Da Lascaux al digitale (2021). He also edits the journal Tropos: Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica.

luca davico

Luca Davico is Assistant Professor at the Department Dist of the University and the Politecnico of Turin; he teaches Urban Sociology, Sociology of Innovation and Social Research Methodology. He carried out research on the following topics: sustainability, social sciences in urban plans, policies, transformation and development, public art, transports, training, tourism, toponymy. Since 1999 to 2023 he has been the scientific director of Rapporto Rota (which analyzes policies and data on Italian metropolitan cities). Since 2014 he coordinates the project Immagini del cambiamento (documentation and analysis on urban transformation in the area of Torino; selected publication: Torino immagini del cambiamento, ed. by Paola Guerreschi and Luisa Montobbio, Edizioni del Capricorno, Torino 2020). In 2016 he started the project Arte per strada Torino (with the first complete census of public art in Turin and its surroundings; selected publication: Le molte facce dell'arte pubblica: un censimento a Torino, in AbiTO. Abitudini estetiche e arte pubblica. Il caso Torino, ed. by Alessandro Bertinetto, Luca Davico and Paolo Furia, Franco Angeli, Milano 2024).

lORENZO DENICOLAI

Lorenzo Denicolai is Assistant Professor of Image Languages and Media Theories at the University of Turin. He is a member of the “Luciano Gallino” Laboratory of Human Simulation and Educational Robotics (DFE UniTo) scientific committee. He is a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre “Dis4Change – Studies on Climate Change and Environmental Discourse”. Together with Valentina Domenici (Roma Tre University), he coordinates the inter-university research group “I media dei piccoli” regarding the relation of kids-audiovisual products. His main research topics are Human-Technology relations, Media ecology and archaeology, and Audiovisual media for learning from the point of neuro-cognitive view.

JACOPO FRASCAROLI

Jacopo Frascaroli is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Turin and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy in York in 2022 as part of a Leverhulme-funded interdisciplinary project entitled "Learning from Fiction". Jacopo's research brings together aesthetics, philosophy of language and mind, and cognitive science. His current work explores the potential of predictive processing as a general framework for the study of the arts and aesthetics. Jacopo is currently editing a theme issue on this topic for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

PAOLO FURIA

Paolo Furia currently works as a researcher at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin (Italy). He has been working as a postdoc at the University of Turin since November 2017. He is a member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics, the Interuniversity Center of Morphology, the Centro Studi Luigi Pareyson and the Society for Ricoeur Studies. He participated in international conferences and seminars in Berlin, Paris, Palermo, Rome, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Leuven, Ljubljana, Bratislava and was a member of project teams in Paris (EHESS and Paris Nanterre) and Slovakia (BISLA). He is the authour of three monographs in Italian and various articles in English, French and Italian. He obtained his Scientific Qualification in Aesthetics in November 2020.

francesco ianì

Francesco Ianì is a Research Fellow in General Psychology at the University of Turin (Italy), Department of Psychology. His research primarily focuses on memory and reasoning from the perspective of embodied cognition, as well as on the theoretical foundations of cognitive science. His interests include the role of motor fluency in recognition memory and aesthetic judgments.

andrea malvano

Andrea Malvano is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin, where he teaches Music History, Music Dramaturgy, and Music Education. He chairs the Cinema, Performing Arts, Music, and Media program (CAM). A graduate in Piano Performance and Modern Literature, he earned a master’s degree in Lyon and a Ph.D. from the Universities of Turin and Milan. Malvano has authored books on Debussy, Schumann, and the historical archive of the RAI Orchestra and has contributed to leading international journals and publishers such as Cahiers Debussy, Revue de Musicologie, and Routledge. He collaborates with major institutions, including Opéra National de Paris and Teatro alla Scala. He has led national research projects (PRIN) on the RAI Orchestra Archive, 20th-century music audience education, and visualization of instrumental music. Currently, he directs a PNRR project on the archive of the Accademia Filarmonica-Società del Whist. In 2024, he was a guest professor at Sorbonne University. His 2022 monograph on Debussy was translated into French (Debussy, un nouvel art de l’écoute). He also serves as Artistic Director of the De Sono Association.

gabriele marino

Gabriele Marino is a semiotician working as a researcher at the University of Turin, where he teaches Semiotics of music cultures. He mainly deals with music, online communication, and semiotic theory. He is the Secretary of the Italian Association for Semiotic Studies and of the Italian branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. With Bruno Surace, he created #semioboomer, an 80-episode podcast, and edited the book TikTok. Capire le dinamiche della comunicazione ipersocial (Hoepli, 2023), the first Italian essay on the topic. Among his publications: Frammenti di un disco incantato. Teorie semiotiche, testualità e generi musicali, Aracne 2020; Fifty years off-key: A map of musical semiotics from the Italian perspective, in “Zeitschrift Für Semiotik” 44; “The Biggest Meme. Harlem Shake Ten Years After”, in V. Schafer, F. Pailler (eds.), Online Virality. Spread and Influence, DeGruyter, 2024.

benoît monginot

Benoît Monginot holds a PhD in French Literature (2012). Researcher in French Literature at the University of Turin, Professeur agrégé of Literature (France), former member of the ALEA research group, he is an investigator of the national research project (PRIN) "Declinazioni del rischio: per un'archeologia degli immaginari estetico-letterari dal Novecento alla contemporaneità nella letteratura di lingua francese" (2022-2025). He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry, literary theory, the relationship between philosophy and literature, and creative writing practices.

Giulia Muggeo

Giulia Muggeo is researcher at the University of Turin, where she teaches History of popular cinema and Forms and genres of radio-television spectacle. She worked as assegnista di ricerca within the PRIN project "F-ACTOR. Forme dell'attorialità mediale contemporanea. Formazione, professionalizzazione, discorsi sociali in Italia (2000-2020)". She published on the journals "La Valle dell'Eden", "Bianco e Nero”, "JICMS", "Comunicazioni Sociali", "Arabeschi". She is the author of "Marcello Mastroianni" (Carocci, 2024), "Star Domestiche. Le origini del divismo televisivo in Italia" (Kaplan, 2020) and "Marcello Mastroianni. Echi e riscritture di un attore"(Bonanno, 2017). She is a member of CRAD (Centro Ricerche Attore e Divismo) in Turin and of the editorial board of the journal "La Valle dell'Eden".

armando petrini

Armando Petrini is Full Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Turin, where he teaches History of Theatre, History and Theories of the Actor, and Research Theatre. He is a member of the boards of Il Castello di Elsinore and Mimesis Journal and serves on the Directive Council of the CRAD (Centro di Ricerca sull’Attore e il Divismo) at UniTo’s Department of Humanities. Petrini’s research focuses on the history of acting from the 16th to the 20th century, particularly Italian theater, and theater during World War I. He has also conducted extensive research on postwar experimental theater, with figures like Carmelo Bene, Carlo Quartucci, Carlo Cecchi, and Rino Sudano, and on the cultural industry’s history and phenomenology, engaging critically with theorists like Adorno, Debord, and Pasolini. His publications include: Gustavo Modena. Teatro, arte, politica (ETS, 2012), Fuori dai cardini. Il teatro italiano negli anni del primo conflitto mondiale (UTET, 2020), and Carmelo Bene (Carocci, 2021).

GIACOMO PEZZANO

Giacomo Pezzano is a Junior Assistant Professor in Moral Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences at the University of Turin. He is the author of numerous scientific publications as well as works aimed at the dissemination and communication of philosophical and cultural ideas. His research spans philosophical anthropology, ontology, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of images. Currently, he is the principal investigator of two research projects focused on rethinking the theoretical and practical modes of producing and disseminating philosophical knowledge in the context of transformations brought about by new media. Among his recent books are Philosophy of Relationships (Filosofia delle relazioni, co-authored with Laura Candiotto, Genoa, 2019), Inheriting (Ereditare, Milan, 2020), Thinking Reality in the Digital Era (Pensare la realtà nell’era digitale, Rome, 2023), and D1git4l-m3nte (Milan, 2024).

lorenzo pia

Lorenzo Pia is Associate Professor of Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology at the University of Turin. His research activities include mainly the Neurocognitive signature of the bodily self, neurogastronomy, sports neuroscience, and dog cognition.

Francesca piovesan

Francesca Piovesan is a PhD student in Neuroscience at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on learning dynamics within the framework of the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis, with a particular interest in intrinsic motivation and its role in enhancing cognitive function. She specializes in using EEG to investigate neurophysiological correlates of learning, particularly in healthy aging and pathological conditions such as dementia.

alessandro pontremoli

Alessandro Pontremoli is a Full Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Turin, where he coordinates the Performance and Music curriculum for the Doctorate in Humanities. He serves as a scientific advisor for the SCT – Social and Community Center in Turin and is a member of the Knowledge Community at CCW – Cultural Welfare Center. Additionally, he is part of the scientific boards for the journals Comunicazioni Sociali, Il Castello di Elsinore, and Danza & Ricerca, and serves as the editor-in-chief of Mimesis Journal. In 2015, Pontremoli was awarded the prestigious Luigi Pirandello National Theatre Prize (Essay Section) for his book Danza e Rinascimento. Cultura coreica e “buone maniere” nella società di corte del XV secolo (2011). His research primarily focuses on the history and aesthetics of dance, with a particular emphasis on the 15th–18th centuries and contemporary practices, as well as on social and community theater. Among his major works are La danza nelle corti di antico regime. Modelli culturali e processi di ricezione fra natura e arte (2012), Elementi di teatro educativo, sociale e di comunità (2015), La danza 2.0. Paesaggi coreografici del nuovo millennio (2018), and L’arte del ballare. Danza, cultura e società a corte fra XV e XVII secolo (2021). Recently, he edited the critical edition of Giulio Mancini’s manuscript treatise Del origin et nobiltà del ballo (2024).

JENNY PONZO

Jenny Ponzo is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin, where she teaches Semiotics, Semiotics of Religious Cultures, and Semioethics. She currently serves as Director of the Interdepartmental Research Center on Communication (CIRCe). From 2018 to 2024, she was the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project NeMoSanctI ("New Models of Sanctity in Italy"). Previously, she conducted research and teaching at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Germany). She has authored numerous academic essays and three monographs, including Religious Narratives in Italian Literature after the Second Vatican Council: A Semiotic Analysis (De Gruyter, 2019). She has also edited and co-edited several volumes, including Interpreting and Explaining Transcendence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Beyond (2021) and Culture della persona (2021).

ivan quartesan

Ivan Quartesan is PhD candidate at the Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium (FINO). His research interests include visual studies, iconology, and morphology.

irene ronga

Irene Ronga is a researcher at the Department of Psychology at the University of Turin, where she coordinates the Brain Plasticity and behavior changes (BIP) research group. Her research focuses on learning, plasticity, and change processes, and how these are influenced by aesthetic appreciation. Irene teaches Psychological Neuroscience at the University of Turin and at the Polytechnic University of Turin and she currently serves as Vice President of the Body and Mind Sciences master degree program (Department of Psychology, UniTo). She has been invited to present her research at several prestigious academic institutions in Italy and abroad. Each year, together with Jacopo Frascaroli and her colleagues in the BIP research group, she organizes the International Conference on Beauty and Change, one of the main international gatherings in interdisciplinary aesthetics.

CARLO SERRA

Carlo Serra teaches Media and Image Aesthetics at the University of Turin and Image and Sound Theory at the University of Calabria. His research revolves around philosophy of music, with particular attention to phenomenological issues linked to the forms of listening.

SIMONA STANO

Simona Stano is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin and Deputy Director of the Interdepartmental Research Center on Communication (CIRCe). Her research focuses on the semiotics of food and taste, corporeality, and communication. On these topics she has presented, organized, and directed international conferences and published extensively, including three monographs (Eating the Other: Translations of the Culinary Code, 2015; I sensi del cibo. Elementi di semiotica dell'alimentazione, 2018; and Critique of Pure Nature, 2023). In 2018, she received a Marie Curie Global Fellowship for her research project COMFECTION (2019–2021) on the semiotic analysis of digital food communication.

bruno surace

Bruno Surace, PhD in Semiotics and Media, is a researcher at the University of Turin, where he teaches Cinema e Comunicazione audiovisiva and Forme della serialità. His work focuses on film, media studies, and semiotics. He has published over seventy articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters in both Italian and international collections. He is the author of the monographs I volti dell'infanzia nelle culture audiovisive. Cinema, immagini, nuovi media (Mimesis, 2022) and Il destino impresso. Per una teoria della destinalità nel cinema (Kaplan, 2019). He has presented at conferences and seminars in Italy, Europe, China, and the USA. He has served as a visiting scholar at UCC (University College Cork). He is an official indexer for FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives). Since 2023, he has been teaching Storia e analisi del film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Turin campus). Since 2019, he has been a lecturer at the Collegio Interuniversitario Renato Einaudi in Turin. From 2020 to 2023, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship as part of the ERC FACETS project, and in 2019, he was a postdoctoral fellow for the WeValueFood project (Horizon2020). He also contributes as a film critic for the online magazine Gli Spietati.

Greta Varesio

Greta Varesio is a PhD candidate at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Turin. She is part of the BraIn Plasticity and Behavior Changes (BIP) research group, led by Dr. Irene Ronga. In her doctoral research she focuses on exploring the relationship between neuroaesthetics and higher-order cognitive functions. Specifically, she is particularly interested in investigating the connection between the complexity of visual stimuli, visual pattern recognition and aesthetic appreciation. Additionally, she is involved in research projects examining the link between implicit learning and aesthetic appreciation, including studies conducted with clinical populations.

silvia verdiani

Silvia Verdiani is Research Fellow in German language, translation and linguistics at the University of Turin. She studied Linguistics, Art History, German and Romance Studies at the University of Turin and specialized in literary translation from German at the Scuola Europea di Traduzione Letteraria in Turin (she translated authors such as Franzobel, Mela Hartwig, Konrad Lorenz, Billie Wilder). She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistic at the University of Potsdam and in Digital Humanities at the University of Turin-Genoa. She published many papers and three books within the research fields of linguistics, multimodal linguistics, German studies, literary translation, language teaching and lexicography.

Maria-chiara villa

Maria-Chiara Villa is PhD Student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology of the University of Turin, Italy. Her research focuses on neuropsychology and action representation, particularly using neuroimaging approaches. She is currently working on projects that aim to study how aesthetics appreciation modulates action representations and its subsequent motor activation.

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