Julia Sebastien

Julia Sebastien is a media psychology researcher and designer exploring the intersection of immersive technology, culture, and humanism through her Ph.D. in Communication at Cornell.  In keeping with her ongoing research in Cornell’s Social Media Lab and Virtual Embodiment Lab, Julia investigates how immersive media can activate awe, self-transcendence, empathy, prosociality, and a deeper sense of connection to others and our shared human experience, a specialization she increasingly applies to European cultural and historical contexts.

Most recently, Julia joined the Casa della Regina Carolina Project, where she assisted in the archaeological excavation of an ancient Roman villa in the Scavi di Pompeii, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Drawing on her master’s degree in immersive learning design from Harvard, she is also contributing to the curation of an immersive digital reconstruction of the villa as it stood in 79 CE, designed for experiential educational purposes.

Previously, Julia conducted a formal evaluation for the Harvard Art Museums, assessing the effectiveness of their digital Art+Science Pathway in communicating how scientific imaging techniques like X-ray analysis reveal hidden layers and material histories beneath classical European artworks and cultural artifacts.  

Julia positions emerging technologies as bridges—transporting learners across space, time, and points of view—to transform distant, abstract, or even improbable possibilities into tangible, emotionally resonant learning experiences. It is her defiantly hopeful belief that digital media experiences fostering deep, compassionate engagement with other places, times, and people can deepen our understanding of ourselves, of our history, and our shared responsibility to shape our collective future.

Nora Siena

Nora Siena's dissertation, “Inoperative Brevitas: The Contamination of Short Literary and Philosophical Forms and the Twentieth-century Italian Racconto,” identifies a paradigmatic mode of twentieth-century European poetics and philosophical programs in the disruption of the historical tie between textual brevity and exemplarity. Within the genre of exemplary narratio brevis (exempla, parables, apologues, fables), the formal/rhetorical principle of brevitas has been codified to elicit an allegorical reading connecting the text to a universal truth, norm, or doctrine. Relying on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of inoperativity (a potentiality that is not exhausted in its actualization), she defines as “inoperative brevitas” a category of twentieth-century literary and philosophical forms that exhibit the genre constants of brevitas while withdrawing from its exemplifying function. Focusing on the work of Italian and German philosophers, in her dissertation she argues that the employment of inoperative brevitas in philosophical writing opens new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between universality and particularity and thus the entanglement of language, ethics, and politics. Furthermore, she maintains that the notion of inoperative brevitas illuminates a tendency of the twentieth-century Italian racconto that would otherwise elude any critical definition.

Chiara Visentin
Director's Fellow

Chiara Visentin is a PhD candidate in the Medieval Studies Program at Cornell, with a background in philosophy and sociology. She is interested in the transformations of political cultures, identities and institutions in the central Middle Ages and especially the 12th century, with a focus on the Anglo-Norman and Angevin polities, extending between the British Isles and Western France, as well as their neighbors like Capetian France, and more distant but related polities such as Norman Sicily. She investigates relations between political and educational (ex-)changes as part of the processes that Robert Bartlett referred to as the "making of Europe" through "conquest, colonization and cultural change", especially by means of the multilingual and multiple textual traditions linked to wisdom literature.