I am a film and cultural studies scholar at the University of Amsterdam, where I teach European Studies and Italian cinema. I work on the question of how film – and occasionally, literature, architecture, and the visual arts – participate(s) in cultural conversations, particularly around questions of migration, colonial histories, and the ways local, national, European, and global cultures are imagined. Alongside writing and teaching, I am interested in what happens when filmmaking becomes part of the research process itself.
Ongoing Research, Projects, and Events
I am working on a project entitled The Moving Myth of Italy (you can e-mail for a draft or conversation).
Between October 2026-March 2027, I introduce (in Dutch) five films written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in De Uitkijk (Amsterdam).
In December 2026, I will discuss at the 9th CERPE International workshop at the Hong Kong Metroplotian University an upcoming article of mine of Lao Ma’s short stories translated into Italian, in collaboration with the translators.
Together with Franziska Plümmer, I initiated the research project Chinese Selfies in Europe. Within this group, I research how cultural production shapes the terms on which people become recognisable as ‘Chinese’, ‘Italian’, or ‘European’, and how people participate in, negotiate, or resist that recognition.
On 1-2 October 2026, I organised three film screenings followed by a workshop entitled Thinking in Film.
My monograph entitled A Black commedia all’italiana? Untold Postcolonial Awareness in Italian Cinema is coming out in March 2027 with Bloomsbury Academic. Through an in-depth analysis of four commedie all’italiana (‘Comedies, Italian Style’) produced between 1952-1968, I reveal how these postwar Italian comedy films portray italianità (Italianness) as performative, positioned against a seemingly necessary, imagined Black Other (understood here as a physically distinguishable character representing everything the Italian is not, or not supposed to be).
Selected publications
Currently under peer-review. ‘Rudolph Valentino Looks. The Circulatory Gaze and the Development of the ‘Latin Lover’ in Italian Cinema’ in Joep Leerssen, Francesca Zantedeschi (eds), National Characters in the Roaring Twenties: Gender and Ethnicity in Popular Culture and Modern Media, Amsterdam, Brill (e-mail for a copy).
In press. (2026). ‘The (Im)Possibility of “Fascist” Architecture. The Roman Neighbourhood EUR as a Trope of Fascism’s Afterlives’, Francesca Zantedeschi, Salvatore Giusto (eds), History Repeating: European Populism and Cultural Production in a Trans-Historical Perspective, Il Sileno Edizioni (e-mail me for a copy).
2025. ‘De mythevorming van Fellini en Rome. Fellini en, in, over, is Rome’, in: Roma Aeterna, 13, no. 02, 53-61.
Links
Go to News and Events for information about popular publications, ideas, conferences, media projects, and more.
Read more about me | Publications | UvA Profile | ORCID
Still Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)