Dr Leonardo Impett, Faculty of English

 

 

Biographical Information

Leonardo Impett is Associate Professor in Digital Humanities in the Faculty of English, and Bye-Fellow of Selwyn College. He is currently on leave from Cambridge to lead Machine Visual Culture (2025-2030), a research group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome.

His work sits between digital humanities, art history, visual culture (or 'Bildwissenschaft'), and critical AI studies. He is particularly interested in what happens when AI systems are treated as historical and cultural objects in their own right; and especially on the implicit philosophies of vision of machine vision; the cultural and ideological dimensions of machine learning systems; and what to make of AI-generated images. 

Leonardo grew up in Cambridge, where he studied Engineering. He did his PhD at the Image and Visual Representation Lab at EPFL, with a thesis on computational methods for the history of art. Before returning to Cambridge, he was Research Intern at Microsoft Research Cairo, Fellow at Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Computer Science at Durham University. 

Research Interests

Digital humanities; computational humanities; digital art history; computer vision and visual culture; ethics and philosophy of AI, especially visual AI; cultural studies of AI; AI as visual culture. 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Possible areas include digital art history; computational approaches to images, archives, and cultural heritage; computer vision and visual culture; ethics and philosophy of AI, especially visual AI; cultural studies of AI; AI as visual culture; multimodal models and image-text systems; datasets and their cultural politics; machine learning and ideology; critical technical practice; media archaeology of AI; and theoretical or historical approaches to digital humanities.

He is especially interested in projects that combine close attention to visual, archival, or cultural material with technically informed methods or concepts.

While on leave from Cambridge (until 2030), he is not regularly taking on new PhD students.

Selected Publications

2026. Vector Media. Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert. Foreword by Johanna Drucker. University of Minnesota Press & Meson Press. 

2026. "Digital Art History for Datasets: For an Iconology of AI." Leonardo Impett. In Artificial Intelligence and Art History: Looking at Images in an Algorithmic Culture (Proceedings of the British Academy), edited by Kathryn Brown.

2024. "Digital Art History as Critical AI." Leonardo Impett. Art Bulletin 106.2: 11–14.

2023. "There Is a Digital Art History." Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert. Visual Resources 38.2: 186–209.

2021. "Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing." Mitra Azar, Geoff Cox, and Leonardo Impett, guest editors. AI and Society, special issue.

2019. "Ikonographie und Interaktion: Computergestützte Analyse von Posen in Bildern der Heilsgeschichte." Peter Bell and Leonardo Impett. Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 24.1.

2017. "Totentanz: Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln." Leonardo Impett and Franco Moretti. New Left Review 107.