Silvia Casini

Unisci ciò che non è mai stato unito e che sembrava impossibile da unire.

R. Bresson

Silvia Casini

Cinema, fotografia, radio, televisione e media digitali (PEMM-01/B)

Professoressa associata
Email: silvia.casini@uniud.it
Studio: Palazzo Caiselli, second floor, room 2.2
Insegnamenti: Narrazioni seriali; Storia e tecnica della fotografia; Televisione e nuovi media

Silvia Casini

Cinema, fotografia, radio, televisione e media digitali (PEMM-01/B)

Professoressa associata
Email: silvia.casini@uniud.it
Studio: Palazzo Caiselli, second floor, room 2.2
Insegnamenti: Narrazioni seriali; Storia e tecnica della fotografia; Televisione e nuovi media

Unisci ciò che non è mai stato unito e che sembrava impossibile da unire.

R. Bresson

My academic background is situated at the intersection of philosophy, cinema, and the visual arts. After completing a degree in Philosophy at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and a Master's in Film and Television Screenwriting in Rome, I earned a PhD in Film and Visual Studies from Queen's University Belfast, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). These years solidified my interest in the role of images and in the aesthetic, epistemological, and social implications of data-visualisation and emerging technologies.

Following experiences in curatorship across museums and film festivals, and in research at Observa – Science in Society and Ca' Foscari University, I worked from 2015 to 2025 in Scotland at the University of Aberdeen. I continue to be an Honorary Reader (Associate Professor) in Film and Visual Culture and an Honorary Curatorial Fellow there. Having obtained the Italian Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN) for the role of Associate Professor in the fields of L-ART/06 (Cinema, Photography, Television) and 11/C4 (Aesthetics and History of Philosophy), I am currently an Associate Professor in the DIUM Department at the University of Udine and an Affiliated Researcher at the Pa.S.T.I.S. research centre at the University of Padua. I have undertaken research periods at several institutions, including the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I am a member of the Editorial Board of Oboe: Journal On Biennials and Other Exhibitions.

At the University of Aberdeen, I directed the Medical Humanities Intercalating Degree, contributing to its growth and the expansion of its educational offerings. I believe that Medical Humanities currently provides a privileged ground for rethinking the relationship between knowledge, the body, and representation: every image, even the most technical, is always an act of care and listening. For me, teaching is a research laboratory where theory, images, and visual practices intersect with ethical and political reflection on the body and care. Through curatorial and public engagement projects, I seek to give voice to the aesthetic and social dimension of scientific and medical images.

My research, conducted both through archival work and ethnographic methodologies, explores the visual culture of medicine and science, scientific cinema and its festivals, with a constant focus on emergent technologies and new media as spaces where the image, the datum, and subjectivity are being redefined. I have received competitive research funding from bodies including the Leverhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust, and the Scottish Crucible.

I am the author of the monographs Giving Bodies Back to Data (MIT Press, 2021) and Il Ritratto Scansione (Mimesis, 2016), and numerous essays in international journals such as Cinéma & Cie, Configurations, Leonardo, Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, Studi di Estetica, The Senses and Society, and Visual Culture Studies. I am currently working on the monograph Ephemeral Science Film Festivals and their Archives post WWII (Springer Briefs) and an essay on models and playable media.

Pubblicazioni

Giving Bodies back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology

Cambridge (MA) 2021

Il ritratto scansione: immaginare il cervello tra neuroscienza e arte

Milano-Udine 2016

How to Re-Activate the Endangered Archive of a Historical Science Film Festival: A Speculative Approach

in: G. Fossati e A. van den Oever (curr.), Exposing the Film Apparatus. Global Laboratory Perspectives, Amsterdam 2025, 131–141

Communicating Science Through Films: The Case of the International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film

Science as Culture 34 (2024) 89–113 (con P. Magaudda e F. Neresini)

After Images: Technologies of the Body and the Archive

in: F. Johnstone, A. Morehead e I. Wiltshire (a cura di), Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, London 2026, 35–40

The Space between Bodies: Exploring Contagion without Contact from Cohl’s Animated Cephaloscope (1910) to Feuerstein’s Borgy & Bes (2018)

Visual Culture Studies, 03/04 (2022) 33–57

The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma, and Medical Humanities

Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, 22/39 (2022) (a cura di S. Casini, A. Cati e D. Toschi)

Synaesthesia, transformation and synthesis: toward a multi-sensory pedagogy of the image

The Senses and Society 12 (2017) 1–17

Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola, and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures

in: A. Grønstad e H. Gustafsson (curr.), Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics, and the Moving Image, London 2014, 139–161

Beyond the Neuro-Realism Fallacy: From John R. Mallard’s Hand-painted MRI Image of a Mouse to BioArt Scenarios

in NUNCIUS Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 32/2 (2017) 440–471

Phantasmata of Dance: Time and Memory within Choreographic Constraints

in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 55/3 (2019) 325–338

Nuove cartografie corporee: Dal molare al molecolare, dal corpo trasparente a quello potenziale

in Elephant & Castle. Laboratorio dell’Immaginario 22 (2020) 4–26

Theorizing media art in light of STS: Factura of ephemeralities

in Artnodes. Journal on Art, Science, and Technology Studies (2025) (con K. Fedorova)

Visibilizing the Patient’s Body through Anticipation: A Matter of Care

in Reti Saperi Linguaggi. Italian Journal of Cognitive Studies 2 (2023) 291–312

That Obscure Object of Desire. Some Notes for a Slow Art-Science

in Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 13/2 (2023) 87–104

A missed encounter between species. The interplay of scientific realism and aesthetics in Painlevé’s cinematographic experiments on the octopus

in Studi di Estetica, 24/3 (2022) 127–156

What Counts as Data and for Whom? The Role of the Modest Witness in Art-Science Collaboration

in: H. S. Rogers, M. Halpern, D. Hannah, V. de Ridder-Vignone (curr.), The Routledge Handbook of Art, Science and Technology Studies, London 2021, 49–62