I am Head of Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford, Ashmolean Museum and Bate Collection of Musical Instruments. My research is located at the interdisciplinary intersection of material culture studies, art and architectural history and music history, and my publications focus on musical instruments, soundscapes, space and the senses in Renaissance social life. My work combines the analysis of historical materials with 3D virtual modelling, GIS platforms and acoustic analyses, to investigate the relationship between art, sound, space and the senses.
I am currently working on two main projects. The first explores the multiple sensory registers through which urban events and rituals were encountered and experienced in the early modern Venetian terraferma. My second project, a book entitled Fantastic, Monstrous and Marvellous Musical Instruments of the Global Renaissance, explores decorations, ornaments and the carvings of human and nonhuman figures, monsters and grotesque creatures on musical instruments. This work, funded by British Academy/Leverhulme Trust in collaboration with the Bate Collection and Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, constitutes the first comprehensive study of these decorative elements, exploring what they say about the visual, material and (non-)auditory dimensions of Renaissance music culture. I am also currently editing a collection of essays on the material culture of Renaissance music entitled Rethinking Renaissance Musical Instruments.
I am the founder and academic lead of the ‘Digital Humanities and Music Heritage Network: Sound, Space, Objects’ at TORCH, an interdisciplinary team of scholars working on digital humanities, musical instruments, built environment and sound from a variety of perspectives and across disciplines. I have also recently joined the research group ‘(En)coding Heritage’ (https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/people/emanuela-vai) where I explore the benefits and limitations of digital humanities methods for approaching and understanding historical sources, material objects and cultural heritage.
I am one of the convenors of the Early modern Italian seminar.
For more information, please see my page on the History Faculty website.
Twitter: @DrEmanuelaVai
Email: emanuela.vai@worc.ox.ac.uk