Francesco Zucconi received his PhD in “Studi sulla rappresentazione visive. Storia, teoria e produzione delle arti e delle immagini” from the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Florence, in 2012. He has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2015-2017) and a Lauro de Bosis Fellow at Harvard (2017-2018). He joined the Department of Architecture and Arts at IUAV University of Venice in 2019, where he is an associate professor of film, media, and visual culture. In the Spring Semester of 2024, he is a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Chicago.
His research and teachings focus on the idea of a geography of cinema and visual culture, highlighting the role they play in defining spatial, social, and political practices. In his book La sopravvivenza delle immagini nel cinema (2013) he studies modern and contemporary cinema as a site for critical reworking of images from the past and other media. In the essay Geografia (2014), written for the Lessico del cinema italiano, he reconstructs a history of landscape in Italian cinema. In his book Displacing Caravaggio (2018), he investigates the ethical and political implications of artworks transfer and proposed a reflection on “displacing” as a theoretical and methodological tool that situates arts and images at the crossroads of multiple disciplinary interests.
He is currently working on a new book on the “border mediascape” of Europe in the new millennium, through the lenses of a series of documentary films made in such geographical and political areas.
Books
- Border Mediascapes: A Geopolitics of Environmental Media (under contract with University of Minnesota Press);
- Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018);
- Sensibilità e potere. Il cinema di Pablo Larraín (co-author Massimiliano Coviello, Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2017);
- La sopravvivenza delle immagini nel cinema. Archivio, montaggio, intermedialità (Milan: Mimesis, 2013).
Edited volumes and special issues of journals
- Pensiero in immagine. Forme, metodi e oggetti teorici per un Italian Visual Thought (co-ed. Angela Mengoni, Milan: Mimesis, 2022);
- Le fascisme italien au prisme des arts contemporains. Réinterprétations, remontage, déconstruction (co-eds. Luca Acquarelli and Laura Iamurri, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021);
- “Les images migrent aussi,” De Facto, 24 (co-eds. Perin Emel Yavuz, Elsa Gomiz, 2021);
- “Remediating Distances,” Img Journal, 3 (co-ed. Matteo Treleani, 2020).
- Sguardi incrociati. Cinema, testimonianza e memoria nel lavoro teorico di Marco Dinoi (co-eds. Massimiliano Coviello and Dimitri Chimenti, Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2011);
- Lo spazio del reale nel cinema italiano contemporaneo (co-eds. Riccardo Guerrini and Giacomo Tagliani, Genoa: Le Mani, 2009).
Selected essays
- “Hot and Cold Borders: Sketches for a Geopolitics of Environmental Media,” Diacritics, 50 (2022);
- “Caravaggio’s Gyroscope. On the Two ‘Moments’ of the Virtual Experience,” An-Icon, 2 (2022);
- “Regarding the Image of the Pain of the Others,” Humanities, 44 (2022);
- “Rischiare la pellicola. Nascita del montaggio e fine del cinema in Salomé di Carmelo Bene,” Engramma, 187 (2021);
- "Mediazione e immunizzazione,” Studi culturali, 2 (2020);
- “‘Accostare cose che non sembrano disposte a essere accostate’. Montaggio e politica secondo Jean-Luc Godard,” Il Verri, 68 (2018);
- “Enjoy Poverty: Humanitarianism and the Testimonial Function of Images,” with N. Perugini, Visual Studies, 32, 1 (2017);
- Displacing as Method, in Art and Humanity: What Is Possible?, The International Red Cross and Red Crescent, The Geneva Haute école d’art et de design (Geneve: The International Committee of the Red Cross, HEAD Publishing, 2022);
- “La rabbia”. Pasolini’s Color Ecstasy, with N. Perugini, in L. Peretti, K. Raizen, eds., Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed: A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2018);
- Geografia, in R. De Gaetano, ed., Lessico del cinema italiano (Milan: Mimesis, 2014).
More essays and information are available here.
Recent Courses in RLL
- ITAL 23624 The Geography of Italian Cinema (Spring 2024)
- ITAL 28424/ITAL 38424 Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Contemporary Visual Culture (Spring 2024)