ABOUT ME
Leopoldina Fortunati is Senior Professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture at the University of Udine, where she teaches Social Robotics at the Master level in Multimedia Communication and Technologies of Information of the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics.
At the University of Udine, Leopoldina served as Chair of under graduate course in Multimedia Science and Technology and Chair of the Ph.D Programme in Multimedia Communication. She also founded the laboratory of research on new media, NuMe.
Leopoldina is a member of the Academia Euroepea, an institution in Europe that promotes the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship, across all subjects, for the public benefit.
In the 1970´s and 1980´s, she had contributed to the tradition of feminist materialism with several publications, including her book “L’arcano della riproduzione. Casalinghe, prostitute, operai e capitale” (1981, Marsilio), which was then translated and published in the US, Korea, Spain, Chile and Switzerland.
In this book she used, in a critical manner, Marxian categories to analyse the life conditions of women, focusing on the economic relevance of housework, care work and prostitution for the entire capital system.
Starting from the analysis developed in the Arcane, in the 1990´s she had begun to carry out research on gender and technologies, founding the sociology of the telephone and of the mobile phone in Italy.
On this topic she edited three important volumes: Italians on the phone (Angeli, 1995), Telecommunications in Europe (Angeli, 1998) and Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication and Fashion (Erlbaum, 2003), the last book she edited with James Katz and Raimonda Riccini.
In 2002 she became the Italian co-investigator of the European funded, research project SIGIS: Strategies of Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society.
In 2003, Leopoldina had promoted with Rich Ling, The Society of Social Studies for Mobile Communication (SSSMC), which intends to facilitate the international advancement of cross-disciplinary mobile communication studies and of which she is co-president.
In 2002, she had been appointed by Ministry of Education, University and Research, as the Italian Representative at the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology ), a funding organization for the creation of research networks. She sat on the Committee on Social Sciences (later also Humanities) from 2002 through 2006 and from 2006 to 2014 on the COST Domain Committee ISCH (Individuals, Societies, Cultures and Health).
She has represented Italy in six COST research networks:
1) COST 248 “The Future European Telecommunications User”;
2) COST 269 “User Aspects of ICTs”, of which she has then been nominated vice president;
3) COST A20 “The Impact of Internet on the Mass Media in Europe”;
4) COST 298 “Participation in the Broadband Society”, where she was the responsible of one working group;
5) COST FP 1104 “New Possibilities for Print Media and Packaging- combining digital with print”;
6) COST IS 1102 “Dynamics of Virtual Work”.
Over the last 40 years, Leopoldina wrote 6 books, edited or coedited 16 books, published more than a hundred essays and more than a hundred pair-reviewed articles, in addition to acting, in the intense role of Associate Editor and reviewer for prestigious journals.
Leopoldina’s professional profile is internationally known; her works have been published in 11 languages and she was invited to talk at the universities of Oxford, London (LSE), Berlin, Erfurt, Budapest, Klagenfurt, Hong Kong, Beijing, Seoul, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Rutgers, Detroit, Manila, Paris, Chicago, etc.
Over 40 years, Leopoldina has become a point reference for many young researchers in the field of Gender Studies, New Media and Social Robotics.
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