About

I am an Italian writer and educator working in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam where I teach courses and seminars on global media, visual culture, fashion and identity, queer of color critique, popular culture in the Arab world, and the aesthetics of counter/surveillance. I trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and design history and theory, primarily in the U.K. and the U.S. Before joining UvA in 2023, I taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Edinburgh, and the New School (NYC). Prior to entering academia, I worked for several years as a fashion editor in Manhattan, something which shaped my interest in the imbrication of bodies, dress, gender, and capital. My scholarly work revolves around the relationship between contemporary aesthetic practices (especially textile-based) and politics, with a geographical focus on the “Middle East” and Southern Europe. More precisely, it looks at how the dressed body and its representations can function as sites of political insurgency against nation-state apparatuses as well as of subjection to governmental violence. I’m concerned with how collective fashioning can be a way of mobilizing affective-political defiance among minoritized (queer and/or racialized) subjects under conditions of colonialism and authoritarianism, as well as how, conversely, it can turn bodies into a target of military and institutional repression.

My first monograph, Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine (2026), argues that grassroots, communitarian creative practices including the clothing design, photography, and videomaking that developed in the 2000s have shaped land-based, anti-capitalist, and anti-nationalist visions of the Palestinian struggle that, through queer aesthetic sensibilities, have managed to anchor transnational solidarity. In the book I sketch a model of artistic activism applicable to settler-colonial contexts even beyond the region, and invoke a queer Indigenous epistemic shift in the analysis of both fashion activism and contemporary Palestinian culture. Previously, I co-edited a volume titled Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress‍ ‍(2023), and I guest-edited journal special issues on global beauty cultures and fashion media histories. I am currently writing an article titled “The Cloth of Gaza,” based on a paper delivered at the American University of Beirut, and I’m editing a special issue of International Journal of Fashion Studies on the visuality and materiality of dress in times of mass violence and global protest.