I am a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a Teaching Fellow in Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. My scholarly work is firmly situated at the intersection of queer studies and critical fashion studies but has far-reaching implications for cultural studies, media studies, and visual culture. I am interested in the ways that aesthetic practices such as fashion image-making, magazine production, and design are used by LGBTQ+ individuals across various historical and geopolitical contexts to shape spaces of cultural expression and community formation. I look at how such practices create collective affective experiences and, at times, inspire action and/or 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 heterosexual and orientalist fantasies embedded in the western(ized) fashion imagination and ultimately carve out alternative social 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 indie fashion photography in the 1990s, and the rise of fashion media activism in the 2000s. At UBC I am developing a research project on fashion in Israel/Palestine. Prior to embarking on an academic career, I worked as a fashion editor for leading publications in the New York fashion industry.

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EDUCATION

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Fashion history, theory, and media

2017 - 2020 Ph.D

The University of Edinburgh

Design and Visual Culture

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