I am an early career cultural theorist working at the intersection of queer studies and critical fashion studies. I am currently based at IUAV University of Venice, where I am a postdoctoral researcher. I received my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 and prior to that I was a lecturer at Parsons The New School and a fashion editor in New York. 

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My scholarly work is about the ways that aesthetic practices such as fashion image-making, magazine production, and design have been used by LGBTQ+ individuals across various geographical and historical contexts to shape spaces of cultural expression and community-formation. I am interested in how such practices can create collective affective experiences and, at times, inspire action and opposition in the viewers, readers, and consumers. In other words, I explore how fashion discourses "from the margins" can function as forms of visual critique toward the destabilization of the hegemonic fantasies of wealth, beauty and whiteness fostered by the fashion system and ultimately carve out alternative imaginaries. My politically engaged inquiry into the visual cultures of fashion has led me to investigate a wide range of topics, such as radical crossdressing in the 1970s, the relationship between fashion imagery and gay pornography in the 1980s, feminist fashion photography in the 1990s, and the rise of fashion media activism in the 2000s.

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EDUCATION

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Fashion history, theory, and media

2017 - 2020 Ph.D

The University of Edinburgh

Design

Queer theories and epistemologies

Affect studies

Aesthetics

2011 - 2013 M.A.

Parsons The New School

Fashion Studies

2007 - 2010 B.A.

Università Roma Tre

Literature and Philosophy