Simone joined the department in 2015 and is since 2018 Programme Director for Loughborough's Communication and Media undergraduate programmes. His main areas of interest are media history and digital media. He completed his Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the University of Turin, Italy, in 2011, and has researched and taught in numerous international institutions, including Columbia University in New York, USA, Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Cologne in Germany, and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of a monograph, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), and of articles published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Communication Theory, Media, Culture & Society, and Media History. He was awarded research fellowships by world-leading institutions such as the Humboldt Foundation and Columbia University’s Italian Academy. 

Simone's latest research focuses on the history of digital media. He is now working on a new monograph project, tentatively entitled "Deceitful Media: Social Life after the Turing Test." The book will provide an excavation of the historical trajectory leading to the emergence of AI technologies such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and social media bots. The early draft of a chapter from this forthcoming book has been published by the journal New Media and Society and is accessible here.

Simone has written on the relationship between media and the imagination, on digital media and culture, and on media archaeology. His research reminds us that media are not only machines, artifacts, and social systems, but also imaginary and cultural constructions that contribute to shape our understanding of broader cultural issues, and create new ways to narrate and make sense of the transformations experienced in our society and everyday life. His first monograph "Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture" (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016; reprinted as paperback in 2017) argues that the emergence of new forms of beliefs in spirits since the middle nineteenth century was closely related to the rise of the media entertainment media industry. Drawing from extensive archival research, the book provides an archaeology of how the supernatural entered into the core of contemporary media culture. He is also the editor, with Nicoletta Leonardi, of "Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century" (forthcoming with Pennsylvania State University Press in 2018).

Simone is also interested in how digital media are imagined and represented, and how this informs how they are used and inserted into our everyday experience and life. He has written on the connections between new media and particular visions of the future, on the rhetorical use in political communication of the myth of the Web as harbinger of democracy and free speech, and on how particular narratives about digital media influence our interaction with them. His publications on these topics have appeared in top-ranked journals such as New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Communication Theory and the Journal of Communication.

Simone teaches primarily in the areas of digital media, media theory and history, and film studies.

Modules taught:

• Introduction to Communication and Media Studies: Historical Themes and Perspectives
• Media and Social Change
• Media and Modernity
• Politics of Representation
• Critical Viewings: Documentary
• Critical Viewings: Film

Main areas of PhD supervision:

• History and theory of digital media
• Media, memory and history

Completed PhD supervisions:

• Suria Hani binti A.Rahman
  Thesis title: Screening Islam: The representation of religion and gender in different genres of Islamic films in Malaysia
  Co-supervised with Paula Saukko

Ongoing PhD supervisions:

• Thais Sarda
  Thesis title: Online surveillance, Tor Network, and anonymity: A study about Deep Web’ perceptions and representations
  Co-supervised with John Downey
• Mona Khan
  Thesis title: Remembering partition online
  Co-supervised with Emily Keightley and Rohit Dasgupta

Books

• Natale, S. Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Reprinted as paperback in 2017.
• Leonardi, N. & Natale, S. (eds.) Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.
• Natale, S. & Pasulka, D. (eds.) Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural. Oxford: Oxford University Press (under contract).

Journal articles (selection)

• Natale, S. If Software Is Narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, Artificial Intelligence and the Eliza Effect. New Media and Society. Published online before print October 15, 2018. doi: 10.1177/1461444818804980
• Natale, S. & Ballatore, A. Imagining the Thinking Machine: Technological Myths and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence. Convergence: The International Journal of New Media Technologies. Published online before print June 20, 2017. doi: 10.1177/1354856517715164
• Natale, S. There Are No Old Media. Journal of Communication 66.4 (2016): 585-603.
• Natale, S. Unveiling the Biographies of Media: On the Role of Narratives, Anecdotes and Storytelling in the Construction of New Media's Histories. Communication Theory 26.4 (2016): 431-449. 
• Ballatore, A. & Natale, S. E-Readers and the Death of the Book: or, New Media and the Myth of the Disappearing Medium. New Media & Society 18.10 (2016): 2379-2394. 
• Natale, S., Ballatore, A. The Web Will Kill Them All: New Media, Digital Utopia, and Political Struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement. Media, Culture & Society 36.1 (2014): 105-21.
• Natale, S.,Balbi, G. Media and the Imaginary in History: The Role of the Fantastic in Different Stages of Media Change. Media History 20.2 (2014): 203-218.
• Beil, B., Natale, S. (eds.), New Media and the Imagination of the Future. Special issue of WI: Journal of Mobile Media vol. 8 no. 2 (2014).
• Natale, S. A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema. Early Popular Visual Culture 10.2 (2012): 125-45.
• Natale, S. Understanding Media Archaeology. Canadian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2012): 523-27.
• Natale, S. Photography and Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century. History of Photography 36.4 (2012): 451-56.
• Natale, S. The Invisible Made Visible: X Rays as Attraction and Visual Medium at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Media History 17.4 (2011): 345-58.
• Natale, S. The Cinema of Exposure: Spiritualist Exposés, Technology, and the Dispositif of Early Cinema. Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 31:1 (2011): 101-117.
• Natale, S. A Cosmology of Invisible Fluids: Wireless, X Rays and Psychical Research around 1900. Canadian Journal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 263-75.