This issue of Comunicazioni Sociali on-line publishes the preprint version of a selection of papers presented by young scholars of the Department of Media, Communication and Performing Arts at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan to international conferences during the years 2010 and 2011. A first group of essays adopts a historical perspective, both on the history of media and on the history of media theory. A second group of essays focuses on some aspects of contemporary media landscape, which can be variously defined as inter-medial, post-medial or media-diffused. Yet, the thematic heterogeneity expresses the research philosophy of the Department. According to this view, media and communication studies are today demanding for a hybrid and flexible approach, which crosses historical, anthropological, sociological, semiotic, philosophical interests, and considers media (from cinema to theatre, from new media to live performance) as a series of apparently different, but actually strongly related, phenomena.