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Barbara Carnevali

https://usi.to/bd8f

Biography

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, Italy, and completed her training in the US (Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago) and in France (Post doc at the Sorbonne University). She has been a fellow at the Institut of Advanced Studies in Paris and at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. She is a member of the European Journal of Philosophy editorial board and scientific curator of the Italian Philosophy Festival.

Her work is centered on "Social Aesthetics”. The core of this approach is the relationship between social forms and aesthetic forms, interpreted through the study of the arts and phenomena that are mediated or constituted by appearance, sensitivity, and taste: reflexivity and self-presentation, recognition, prestige and distinction, rituals, lifestyles, fashion, the public sphere, and advertising. 

Another major part of her research focuses on philosophical modernity with particular interest in the tension between the self and society.

Barbara Carnevali is the author of Romanticism and Recognition. Rousseau and the Modern Self (French edition Geneva 2012, English translation forthcoming for Columbia University Press) and Social Appearances. A Philosophy of Display and Prestige (Columbia University Press, 2020). She is currently finishing a book on the relationship between architecture, design, and politics in the city of Milan during the Italian post-war modernisation (The Red Line. Milan and the Design of Modernity, Milano, Feltrinelli, forthcoming).