I am a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow in Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. My scholarly work, which can be situated at the intersection of queer studies and critical fashion studies, is about the ways that aesthetic practices such as fashion image-making, magazine production, and design have been used by LGBTQ+ individuals across various European and Middle Eastern 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 heterosexual and orientalist fantasies fostered by the global fashion system 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 new research project on fashion activism in Palestine/Israel.

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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