Lorenzo Bartalesi is Associate Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. After studying in Florence and Frankfurt am Main, he defended his doctoral thesis at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He was a Junior Fellow at the Institut d'études avancées d'Aix-Marseille Université (IMéRa) and a Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the EHESS in Paris with the research project “Enacting heritage: The aesthetic dynamics of cultural transmission”. In his research and publications, he has been committed to restoring the aesthetic, as a cognitive and behavioural phenomenon, to a central place in human evolution. In this direction, he has participated in the development of the anthropology of the aesthetic, a transdisciplinary perspective that investigates the role of the aesthetic in the processes of creation and transmission of knowledge, practices, representations and institutions. His publications include the volumes Histoire naturelle de l'esthétique (CNRS Éditions 2021; French edition, updated and expanded of Evolutionary Aesthetics, Rome 2012), Antropologia dell’estetico (Milan 2017) and the articles Aesthetic preferences: An evolutionary approach (2016), From the aesthetic mind to the human cultures (2019) and Inun mondo al di là dell'umano. Modelli ecologici per un'antropologia del vivente (2020). Expert Evaluator for the Horizon programme, he is also Associate editor of the journal Aisthesis and member of the editorial board of the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia.
Areas of specialisation: Aesthetics; Theories of art; Anthropology and Philosophy; Human cultural evolution; Social anthropology.
Research focus: Anthropology of Aesthetics; Evolutionary Aesthetics; Aesthetic Cognition; Cultural Transmission; Origin of Art; Nature-Culture; Pluralism of Human Cognition.
ERC fields: SH5_4; SH5_8; SH5_9; SH3_10
