Faculty Profile: Angelica Pesarini

Angelica Pesarini

Assistant Professor, Department of Italian Studies and Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies

Angelica Perasini.Angelica Pesarini is an assistant professor in the Department of Italian Studies and Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies (CDTS). She earned her PhD from the University of Leeds with a dissertation on “Colour Strategies:  Negotiations of Black Mixed Race Women’s Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Italy.” She has taught courses in gender, race and sexuality at Lancaster University and courses in social and cultural analysis at New York University’s Florence Campus.

Pesarini took up the newly-created position in Race and Cultural Studies/Race and Diaspora that connects the CDTS to the Department of Italian Studies. Her work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, citizenship and identity in Italy and explores the dynamics of race performativity with a focus on colonial and postcolonial Italy. She is also interested in the racialization of the Italian political discourse on immigration. She has previously conducted research on gender roles and the development of economic activities within some Roma communities in Italy, and has analyzed strategies of survival, risks and opportunities associated with male prostitution in Rome.

Pesarini is the author of several publications on issues of race in Italy — in both English and Italian — and is a member of the Black Mediterranean Collective which just published The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

View Angelica Pesarini’s departmental profile