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 – participates 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.
Together with Franziska Plümmer, I am project initiator of the research project Chinese Selfies in Europe.
On 1-2 October 2026, I organise three film screenings followed by a workshop entitled Thinking in Film which will seek to contribute to a shared, interdisciplinary vocabulary for thinking about film in practice and research, and the blurred boundaries between the practicalities of filmmaking and researching – not as an add–on, but as an epistemic practice that can unsettle established hierarchies between text and image, analysis and creation, method and object.
My monograph entitled A Black commedia all’italiana? Untold Postcolonial Awareness in Italian Cinema is coming out later this year 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 much needed imagined Black Other (understood here as a physically distinguishable charater representing everything the Italian is not, or not supposed to be). Through the identification of their grotesque, ‘auto-ethnographic’ treatment of the character of the italiano medio (‘standard Italian’), Luijnenburg illustrates how these films perform a form of postcolonial critique decades before Italian postcolonial theory is usually said to emerge.
Selected publications
In press. (2026). ‘The (Im)Possibility of “Fascist” Architecture. The Roman Neighbourhood EUR as a Trope of Fascism’s Afterlives’, Francseca Zantedeschi, Salvatore Giusto (eds), History Repeating: European Populism and Cultural Production in a Trans-Historical Perspective, Il Sileno Edizioni
2025. ‘De mythevorming van Fellini en Rome. Fellini en, in, over, is Rome’, in: Roma Aeterna, 13, no. 02, 53-61.
2022. ‘Somalo-italianità and its Dis/Continuities in Northern Europe: Filtering Out Translanguaging and Identity Formations Through Language and Linguistic Landscapes in Somali-European Diasporic Communities’, in: Migrazioni, cittadinanze, inclusività. Narrazioni dell’Italia plurale, tra immaginario e politiche per la diversità, ed. Leonardo De Franceschi, Roma: Tab Edizioni, 463-76.
2022. ‘The Three Layers of Elia Moutamid’s Cinema’. The Italianist, n. 41, 2021/3, 220-228
Links
Go to my blog 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)
Linde Luijnenburg 