My background
I am an Associate Professor in Media Studies at the Institute of Media and Journalism (IMeG), Faculty of Communication Sciences, USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland). At this institution, I am also program director of the Bachelor in Communication Sciences, director of the China Media Observatory, and vice-director of the Institute of Media and Journalism. Furthermore, I am Chair of the ECREA Communication History Section. I received a BA and MA in Communication Sciences at the University of Turin (Italy) in 2002 and 2004 and a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Social History of Communication at USI in 2008.
Digital media and history: A long-term research
I have been doing research on the history of digital media for at least a decade, after being pissed off by all the approaches in communication and media studies that do not consider the diachronic evolution of digitalization. In the meanwhile, I published several papers and one book summarizing this long-term research: A history of digital media. An intermedia and global perspective (Routledge, 2018, co-authored with Paolo Magaudda).
WWW project: when a failure can be turned into a success?
This project was submitted twice to the Swiss National Science Foundation, the first one turned out to be a failure, the second one a success. The project was launched in October 2020, after a long process of selection of two Ph.D. students and 1 PostDoc. Now, we are in the preliminary phase, but very excited to dig into CERN archives, collaborate with eminent scholars at CERN, at the University of Luxembourg, and the Polytechnic of Milan. So, hopefully, this initial failure can be turned into a success…
Future Plans
Who knows? But in the next years, I would like to keep on working on digital media history and historiography. Three keywords for the future: maintenance, archives, and (hopefully) academic travels!