Biography
Biography
Linda Bertelli (she/her) is Full Professor in Aesthetics at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. She is a member of the Faculty Board of the PhD Program in Cultural Systems and, since 2024, has served as Vice Rector for Gender Policies, Equal Opportunities, and Communication. She is also a member of the School’s Board of Directors and Primary Representative for the international Scholars at Risk network.
Her research moves across aesthetics, visual culture, feminist theory, critical archival studies, and the history and theory of photography. Her work focuses in particular on the theory of the image, photographic practices between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, feminist aesthetics, and the visual and material cultures of Italian feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.
She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pisa (Italy). She has been Visiting Professor at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil, Visiting Researcher at Bocconi University, Milan, and Marianne DiPalermo McCauley Visiting Scholar at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, City University of New York.
She was the Principal Investigator of the PRIN 2022 PNRR project “Fotografiste. Women in Photography from Italian Archives” (2023–2026) and has directed several externally funded research projects on photographic archives, gender equality, women’s careers in art and craft, and gendered innovation. Among these are “Archivi in Rete” (2022–2024), “ARTEMIS – ARTE e Mestieri, Indagine Storica e contemporanea” (2024–ongoing), “PRISMA – Parità di Genere e Strumenti Strategici” (2024–ongoing), and the doctoral scholarship project “Gendered Innovation e nuove tecnologie” (2025–ongoing).
Her publications include the monographs Immagini senza quadro: esperienza e rappresentazione nell’opera di Henri Bergson (2014) and L’utopia nell’estetico. Tempo e narrazione in Ernst Bloch (2018). She recently co-authored, with Marta Equi Pierazzini, Il corpo delle pagine. Scrittura e vita in Carla Lonzi (2024). She has also published articles and essays on Étienne-Jules Marey and chronophotography, Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious, Gerda Taro (with Agnese Ghezzi), Carla Lonzi, Italian feminism, feminist aesthetics, and the relationship between photography, archives, and cultural heritage.
She is co-editor of La rivoluzione femminista. Modelli teorici e pratiche politiche (Mimesis, 2024), and serves on the editorial boards of "Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos", published by Taylor & Francis, and the "Yearbook of Moving Image Studies", published by Büchner Verlag. She is a member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics and of the Italian Society for the Study of Photography; from 2018 to 2024, she served on the national board of the Italian Society of Aesthetics.