Choice: Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Guardian: Book of the Year
2004 Kraszna-Krausz Prize Winner

Traversing a varied and enchanting landscape with forays into the fields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography and film, Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. Throughout these pages Bruno insists on the inseparability of seeing and travelling. In an evocative montage of words and pictures she emphasizes that the voyeur must also be the voyageur, that “sight” and “site” are irrevocably connected. In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Messagem; the film-making of Peter Greenaway and Michaelangelo Antonioni; the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, the camera obscura, the curiosity cabinet, the tableaux vivant; and on her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, the journey for which Bruno is our cicerone opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

“In this astonishingly provocative, captivating, tender, elegant, and passionate nonchronological, interdisciplinary book, Bruno (Harvard Univ.) connects splendidly a psychogeography of cultural life. . . . It is more than simply tantalizing. Bruno takes the readers through a poetico-scholarly and picturesque journey—a visual travelogue, based both on philosophical theories and erudite conjectures. . . . Bruno writes like an expressionist painter, who deeply captures the invisible and the instantaneous.” — Choice

“In an exhilarating ride, the reader is transported across this vast hidden landscape to reach a whole new understanding of spatial experience.” — Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University

“A hugely ambitious mapping of the complex intertwinings of film, architecture, and the body. We think of film as a predominantly visual medium, but Bruno insists that it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space... This adventurous book will be of interest to anyone concerned with what we might call ‘mobility studies': the attempt to understand cultural performances not as the manifestation of fixed structures but as the expression of restless energies.” — Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University

Giuliana Bruno is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, was awarded the 1993 Katherine Kovacs prize for the best book in film studies.