Prof. Dr. Massimo Leone

CV

Massimo Leone is Professor of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy, part-time Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China, associate member of Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge, and Director of the Institute for Religious Studies at the “Bruno Kessler Foundation”, Trento. He has been visiting professor at several universities in the five continents. He has single-authored fifteen books, edited more than fifty collective volumes, and published more than five hundred articles in semiotics, religious studies, and visual studies. He is the winner of a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant and of a 2022 ERC Proof of Concept Grant. He is editor-in-chief of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Turin, Italy, co-editor-in-chief of Semiotica (De Gruyter), and co-editor of the book series “I Saggi di Lexia” (Rome: Aracne), “Semiotics of Religion” (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter), and “Advances in Face Studies” (London and New York: Routledge).

Selected Publications

• LEONE, Massimo (2022) “Post-Structuralist Semiotics: A Reading”, 109-128. In Pelkey, Jamin, ed. 2021. Bloomsbury Semiotics: A Major Reference Work in Four Volumes, 4 vols; vol. 1: “History and Semiosis”. London and New York: Bloomsbury; ISBN: 9781350139442
• LEONE, Massimo (2023) “The Spiral of Digital Falsehood in Deepfakes”, 385-405. The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 36; first published online on 19 January 2023; Electronic ISSN 1572-8722; Print ISSN 0952-8059; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-09970-5
• LEONE, Massimo and Marco VIOLA, eds (2022) What’s so Special About Faces? Visages at the Crossroad Between Philosophy, Semiotics and Cognition, special issue of Topoi, 41, 4 September. Dordrecht: Springer; ISSN: 1572-8749
• LEONE, Massimo (2022) “Visage Mathematics: Semiotic Ideologies of Facial Measurement and Calculus”, 1-26. In Danesi, Marcel, ed. (2022) Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics. Cham (CH): Springer; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_48-1
• LEONE, Massimo (2022) “Semioethics of the Visual Fake”, 187-205. In Andina, Tiziana and Dreier, Thomas, eds (2022) Digital Ethics: The Issue of Images (book series “Bild und Recht”, 5). Baden-Baden: NOMOS; ISBN: 978-3-8487-8841-5

FRIAS Research Project

Envisaging the City: An Interdisciplinary Study of Digital Urban ‘Facescapes’

The project proposes a roadmap for studying the impact of digital technology and artificial intelligence on the presence and meaning of human faces in contemporary cities, with specific attention to the cultural, social, and economic role of automatic facial identification and recognition, facial big data, and the possibility to generate photo-realistic images of human faces through generative adversarial networks and other algorithms of artificial intelligence. The roadmap situates such inquiry within the study of the long-term relation between cities and faces, in all their multiple facets and manifestations. Investigation in this domain is expected to cast new light on how this fundamental affordance of social interaction, the face, and this essential cradle of human coexistence, the city, are modified after the advent of the digital representation of the face. The planned result is a detailed analysis of contemporary “facescapes”, that is, ways in which human faces are turned into support for technological exchange and communicative capital in present-day cities, with specific attention to global urban hubs.