I am currently Full Professor and chair of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme (Utrecht University). I am also the project leader of the NWO project Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament (2023-2028), and the director of the PCI (Postcolonial Studies Initiative).

I studied English and Commonwealth Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy) and University of Sussex (UK) and received my Ph.D., in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Utrecht University. I was visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside (2004), visiting Professor at the University of California Los Angeles Women’s Studies Program (2016), Gemma Scholar at Rutgers University (2014). Between 2017-2019 I was Visiting Professor at Columbia University, department of English and Comparative Literature and Visiting Scholar at the New York University, NYU Steinhardt, Department of Media, Culture and Communication (MCC). In 2020 I was Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Department of Media and Communication.

My expertise is gender and postcolonial critique from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. My research areas include postcolonial feminist theory, cinema studies, Italian postcolonialism, digital media and migration. Among my publications are Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny, 2004) and The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014). I am also editor of Gender, Globalisation and Violence. Postcolonial Conflict Zones (Routledge, 2014) and co-editor of Migrant Cartographies (Lexington Books, 2005) with Daniela Merolla, Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2012) with Marguerite Waller, Deconstructing Europe (Routledge, 2012) with Bolette B. Blaagaard, Postcolonial Transitions in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016) with Gianmaria Colpani and Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018) with Adriano Jose Habed. I have also guest edited several special issues Postcolonial Europe, Digital Migration and Transnational Cinema Studies for Social Identities, Crossings, Interventions, Transnational Cinemas, Popular Communication, Television and New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies, along with publishing in many edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals across disciplines.

I was project leader of the ERC project “Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging” CONNECTINGEUROPE, and project leader of the NWO-PIN (Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics) network project.

For more information,  see the UU website.