Project at HIAS
Envisaging the City: An Interdisciplinary Study of Bio-Digital Urban Facescapes
At HIAS, Massimo Leone will carry out an interdisciplinary research project which aims to investigate the sociocultural impact of facial digital technology in contemporary urban settings, focusing particularly on German metropolises. Leone’s research will explore how human faces in urban environments are increasingly captured by digital devices and analyzed through artificial intelligence, leading to automated facial recognition on a large scale. This phenomenon raises significant ethical, political and social questions, especially regarding privacy, surveillance and the commercialization of facial images.
His Tandem Partner is Frank Fehrenbach, Professor at the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg.
Website
Förderung
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Prof. Dr. Frank Fehrenbach, Art History, University of Hamburg
Biography
Massimo Leone is a Professor of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the University of Turin since 2005. He has been leading the Center for Religious Studies at the “Bruno Kessler Foundation” in Trento since his appointment in 2022. He serves as a part-time Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Shanghai since 2016 and is an associate member of Cambridge Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge and an adjunct professor at the UCAB University of Caracas. Leone is a member of the European Academy and the recipient of both a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant and a 2022 ERC Proof of Concept Grant. He is the editor-in-chief of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication at the University of Turin, Italy, co-editor-in-chief of Semiotica (De Gruyter) and co-editor of several book series.
Leone’s research focuses on cultural semiotics, with particular emphasis on religion, visual cultures and their digital developments. He currently investigates theoretical frameworks for modeling cultural change in semiotic terms, processes of meaning transformation at cultural frontiers as well as semiotic ideologies at the crossroads between material and digital cultures.
Leone’s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Image Information
Anonymous. Mexican mask. Coronel Museum, Zacatecas, Mexico. Photograph by Massimo Leone
Lectures and events (excerpt)
Publications (excerpt)
- HIAS bringt wissenschaftliche Exzellenz nach Hamburg. Article (online), Hamburg Business, 03/05/2025
- Warum der Schüler von Umberto Eco in Hamburg jetzt mit KI forscht. Article (online), Hamburger Abendblatt, 11/27/2024
Publications in the HIAS Library
- Semiotica dei filtri. Edited by Francesco Piluso, Massimo Leone, Lexia – Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 60, 2025
- Il senso immerso – Libertà e smarrimenti del corpo digitale. Edited by Massimo Leone. Lexia – Journal of semiotics, Vol. 59, 2025
- Semiotic Ideologies – Patterns of Meaning-Making in Language and Society. Brill, 2024