Photo Credit: India Gavadi
Dr. Roberto Filippello
Assistant Professor of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam
I am a cultural theorist and Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where I am affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (ACMES).
My work revolves around the relationship between contemporary aesthetics and politics, with a focus on fashion and textile practices in SWANA and Southern Europe. I have published extensively on topics as varied as feminist art in war zones, fashion photography, and queer zines. I have lectured across North America, Europe, Australia, and West Asia.
My first monograph, Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine (2026), is a fieldwork-based cartography of a fashion scene within historic Palestine. New and future research projects explore the looting of clothes and jewelry in the MENA region, anti-extractivist fiber arts across the Mediterranean, and postcolonial/decolonial illustrated magazines in Lebanon. I currently serve as Co-Editor of International Journal of Fashion Studies and sit on the editorial or advisory boards of various journals and book series.
Upcoming Book
In the wake of the second intifada and energized by the Arab Spring, young Palestinian designers have used fashion to voice their political consciousness and forge affective communities in the face of Israeli occupation. This book proposes to understand their practices as “queer decolonial fashion,” a collaborative aesthetic ethos attuned to gender, sexuality, race, and the environment that transcends nationalist framings of the Palestinian struggle. Making the case for queer decolonial fashion as a model of creative activism, Dressed for Dissent shows how these designers’ work—imbricated with body, identity, and land—ultimately emerges as a site where a viable future for a free Palestine can be envisioned, while also offering insights relevant to other settler-colonial contexts.
Publisher
University of California Press
Publication Date
October 6, 2026