Dr Emanuela Vai is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Previously, she has held positions at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York and at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Oxford, she was Hanna Kiel Fellow at the Harvard University Centre for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti.
Her research is located at the intersection of art and architectural history and musicology and her publications focus on musical instruments, soundscapes, space and sensorialities in Renaissance social life. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Royal Historical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the Kress Foundation, the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Newton Trust at the University of Cambridge, among others.
Emanuela continue to champion the public engagement of academic research, working across a diversity of cultural heritage and digital humanities projects with international research centres, funding bodies and HE institutions. She is particularly engaged with building and improving partnerships between academia, policy and industry through the development of cross-sector and cross disciplinary research and funding networks.
Founder of the Renaissance Musical Instrument Network (ReMI), Emanuela serves on the scientific committee of Albertiana and Artes Renascentes and she teaches on the Master of Advanced Studies in Renaissance Polyphony Performance programme at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana. Co-author of Reshaping Sacred Space: Liturgy, Patronage and Design in Church Interiors ca. 1500 – 1750 (2015), she is currently preparing two monographs titled Sensorial Performances in an Early Modern Venetian Town: Art, Music and the Senses at the Confraternity of the Misericordia Maggiore, and Music Materialities, as well as editing a collection of essays on the material culture of Renaissance music.