Emanuela Vai

I am a cultural historian and digital humanities scholar working at the intersection of Early Modern History, Music and Material Culture Studies. My research 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 the founder and academic lead of the Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage Network: Space, Objects and the Senses at TORCH, an interdisciplinary team of scholars working on digital humanities, musical instruments, space and sound from a variety of perspectives and across disciplines; and exploring the benefits and limitations of digital humanities methods for approaching and understanding historical sources, material objects and cultural heritage. 

I am currently working on two main projects. The first explores the multiple sensory registers through which performative urban events and rituals were encountered and experienced in Early Modern Confraternities in the Venetian Terraferma. My second project, a monograph entitled Fantastic, Monstrous and Marvellous Musical Instruments of the Global Renaissance, explores the carvings of human and nonhuman figures, monsters and grotesque creatures on the scrolls and headstocks of stringed musical instruments. This work, based at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, has been funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and the EU Commission, and 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 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