Personal profile
Key Research Interests
PhD Candidate at Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas - Art, Media and American Studies.
Working title: Approaching photographic collections in LGBT Archives in NYC: the Lesbian Herstory Archives as case study.
This research project is supervised by Dr Aristoteles Barcelos Neto and Dr Karen Jacobs.
This project explores the photographic collection held at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) in NYC – a grassroots, volunteer-based, community-funded organisation which promotes and preserves any type of material related to lesbian lives since 1974. By investigating how photographic material is archived, collected, used by the Lesbian Herstory Archives, this research looks at how the photographic collection articulates the three concepts of Lesbian, Herstory and Archives from a museological, visual and gender perspective. This project uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines social anthropology, queer and museum studies theories and is based on qualitative data collected during two field-work seasons (2016-2017) via interviews, participant observation, photo-elicited interviews and photo-based collaborative projects with my participants.
This research aims to expand current knowledge on alternative ways of collecting, preserving and producing visual history for and by lesbian communities in America. Such knowledge facilitates the understanding of photographic collections for Lesbian Archives and aims to help mainstream institutions navigate archival material to promote visibility of lesbian history.
My research interests include: visual anthropology, queer and lesbian studies, queer Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality in museum studies, grass-roots archives, family albums, contemporary American photography.
Biography
BA (Hons), 2007, in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation – University of Padova, Italy.
MA (Cum Laude), 2010, in Foreign Languages for International Communication – University of Padova, Italy.
MA (Distinction), 2014, in the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas – University of East Anglia, UK.