Francesco Casetti

Francesco Casetti is Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale, where he also teaches as an affiliated professor at the School of Architecture. He has been a visiting professor at Paris 3 La Sorbonne Nouvelle, at the University of Iowa, and at Harvard, and has held fellowships at the University of Otago (Summer 2011), at the Bauhaus University-Weimar (Summer 2012), and at the Freie Universtität Berlin (Fall 2019 and Spring 2023). In 2000, at Berkeley, he was awarded the title Chair of Italian Culture for being an outstanding scholar.

He has largely written on cinema and visual media from a perspective inspired by semiotics and cultural studies. After an expansive study on the implied spectator in film (Inside the Gaze, 1986/1999) and in television (Tra me e te, 1988), he combined in an original way close analyses of media texts and ethnographic research of actual audiences (L’ospite fisso, 1995), defining the notion of “communicative negotiations” (Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television, 2002). He has also written extensively on film theories (Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995, which won the Domenico Meccoli Award for the best Italian book of the year in cinema). More recently, he explored the role of cinema in the context of modernity (Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, 2005/2008—winner of the Maurizio Grande Award for the best book of the year in cinema and media), and the reconfiguration of cinema in a post-medium epoch (The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, 2015—winner of the Limina Award for the best International Book on Cinema). Screening Fears: On Protective Media (2023) brings to light the presence of a lineage of modern media whose purpose is to protect individuals from frightening realities to better negotiate their position in the world.