Selenia Anastasi, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Short biography

Selenia Anastasi’s academic background is in Communication Science and Digital Humanities at the University of Catania (Italy). Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Digital Humanities at the Department of Modern Languages and Culture of the University of Genoa, as well as a Research Fellow in Computational Social Science at La Sapienza University of Rome. Her research lies at the intersection of computer science, media studies and gender studies, with a focus on Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis and Multimodality. As a young researcher, Selenia Anastasi has acquired an international profile. In 2024, she undertook a three-month visiting research position at the University of Brighton (UK) and a fellowship as a PhD candidate at the Language Technology Group of the University of Hamburg. During this time, she was supported by computer scientists and NLP experts in the collection of a multilingual corpus from Incel communities. She has already published in Italian and international scientific journals, and in 2019 published a monograph on the historical and cultural roots of Posthumanism. She has experience in writing for radio and newspapers and a passion for digital art practices.

Visiting Fellowship March to May 3, 2025

Motivation

As a visiting scholar at the Institute of Contemporary History, my main goal is to engage in long-term, fruitful cooperation to develop research projects of mutual benefits. With this in mind, I would like to explore the possibility of applying for a Marie Curie Fellowship in 2025 with the support of experts from the Institute. Moreover, the European project “Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives” (ARENAS), in which the Institute as well as my home University, the University of Genoa, are two of the partners, is very in line with my research interests in misogynistic extremist communities.

List of publications (a selection)

Forthcoming: Anastasi, S., Fischer, T., Schneider, F., Biemann, C., IDA – Incel Data Archive: a multimodal comparable corpus for exploring extremist dynamics in online interaction, in Eds. Louis Cotgrove, Laura Herzberg e Harald Lüngen. Digital Linguistics, De Gruyter Open Access Publication.

Anastasi, S. (2024). Annotating the IDA Corpus: Misogynistic and Sexist Content Across Two Transnational Incels’ Communities. In of the 11th Conference on computer-mediated communication and social media corpora (3–8).

Anastasi, S., Schneider, F., Biemann, C., & Fischer, T. (2024). VIDA: The Visual Incel Data Archive. A Theory-oriented Annotated Dataset To Enhance Hate Detection Through Visual Culture. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024) (pp. 59-67).

Anastasi, S., (2019). Verificare di essere umani. Per una teoresi del Transumanesimo, Lekton Edizioni, Acireale. ISBN 978-88-944492-1-1