Barbara Carnevali

Barbara Carnevali is Full Professor in Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and completed her training in the United States (Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago) and in France (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sorbonne). She has been a fellow at the Institut d'Études Avancées in Paris and at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. She is a member of the European Journal of Philosophy and the journal Intersezioni, and is scientific curator of the FestivalFilosofia in Modena. She is a columnist for the daily newspaper La Stampa.

Her work is centered on Social Aesthetics, an approach focused on the relationship between social phenomena and aesthetic forms, including architecture, design, fashion, advertising, and other "functional arts," revisiting and renewing insights from Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Another major direction of her research addresses philosophical modernity, with particular interest in the tension between the self and society. 

Since 2025, she has directed the project “City of Signs. Understanding Logos,” funded by the NOMIS Foundation and based at the Academy.

Her publications include: Romanticismo e riconoscimento. Figure della coscienza in Rousseau (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2004; French edition Geneva, 2012; English translation, Columbia University Press, forthcoming); Social Appearances. A Philosophy of Display and Prestige (Columbia University Press, 2020), a substantially revised and expanded English edition of Le apparenze sociali. Una filosofia del prestigio (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2012). On architecture and design: the French edition of Enzo Mari's 25 modi di piantare un chiodo (Paris, Les Presses du Réel, 2025); Teorie del design in Italia. 1954–1989 (with Emanuele Quinz, Turin, Einaudi, 2026); and The Red Line. Milan and the Design of Modernity (Milan, Feltrinelli, 2026, forthcoming).