Dr Emanuela Vai BA, MMus, MPhil, MEd, PGCert (Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies), PhD

Dr Emanuela Vai is the Scott Opler Fellow at Worcester College and a Lecturer in History of Art and Renaissance Music at the University of Oxford. Previously, she has held positions at the University of Cambridge; at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York (CREMS); and at the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, where she was Hanna Kiel Fellow. She has recently been appointed as visiting professor at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance de Tours (CESR).
Her work has received the support of fellowships and grants from the British Academy, the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Royal Historical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the Kress Foundation, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Academia Belgica and the Newton Trust at the University of Cambridge, among others.
Emanuela’s research is located at the intersection of art history, architectural history and musicology and her publications focus on musical instruments, soundscapes, space and the senses in Renaissance social life. Her work combines the analysis of historical materials with 3D virtual modelling, GIS platforms and acoustic analyses, to investigate the relationship between art, music, space and the senses in the Renaissance. She recently joined the TORCH research group ‘(En)coding Heritage‘ where she explores the benefits and limitations of digital humanities methods for approaching and understanding historical sources, material objects and cultural heritage.
A complete list of publications, conferences and lectures is available at: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1552-5964