Team
Principal Investigator
Simona Stano (–> website) is a Marie Curie Global Fellow and works as Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the University of Turin (UNITO, Italy) and Visiting Research Scholar at New York University (NYU, US).
In recent years, she has also collaborated as researcher and lecturer with a number of international leading institutions (including the University of Toronto, the International Semiotics Institute, Bologna University, Observatorio de la Alimentación, Universitat de Barcelona, etc.).
Dr. Stano holds a PhD in Sciences of Language and Communication from the University of Turin (UNITO, Italy) and a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Lugano (USI, Switzerland).
Her research focuses mainly on semiotics of culture, food semiotics, corporeality and communication studies, and on such topics she has published several papers, chapters of books, edited volumes (including special issues of top semiotic journals such as Semiotica and Lexia) and two monographs (Eating the Other. Translations of the Culinary Codes, 2015; I sensi del cibo. Elementi di semiotica dell’alimentazione, 2018).
Supervisors
Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014) (inventingbabyfood.com), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award, and also winner of the ASFS Best Book Award. Other publications include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor) (Berg, 2011), as well as articles on such diverse topics as ketchup in Reagan’s America, the politics of southwestern cuisine, and a historiography of food riots. Her current research projects include a history of food in US hospitals, and the meanings and uses of food production in religious communities.
Massimo Leone is Full Professor of Semiotics and Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences of the University of Turin, and Permanent Part-Time Professor of Semiotics at Shanghai University. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg. He was visiting scholar at many universities and research centres in Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States. Prof. Leone’s expertise in the field of cultural semiotics and communication studies is reflected by his outstanding academic production: he has lectured in the five continents and single-authored seven books, edited twenty collective volumes, and published more than three hundred papers. He is the chief editor of Lexia, the Scopus-indexed international journal of CIRCe, and editor of the book series Semiotics of Religion (Walter de Gruyter) and I Saggi di Lexia (Aracne).
