Roberto Filippello is an Assistant Professor of Media and Culture affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis as well as the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam in 2023, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship sponsored by the University of Melbourne.

Dr. Filippello's interdisciplinary research looks at how fashion and textiles have been used in various historical contexts to shape spaces of political expression and community formation. He is especially interested in how fashion practices (such as design, photography, and film) can function as forms of critique that destabilize colonial, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist systems, and ultimately carve out alternative aesthetic imaginaries. His first monograph, titled Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Struggle for Palestine, is forthcoming in 2026 with University of California Press. His next research project tracks the development of textile-based art practices across the "Middle East" in the face of western extractivism.

Dr. Filippello's research has been published in a variety of journals, including Third Text, Criticism, Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Australian Feminist Studies, and Fashion Theory. He is the co-editor of the volume Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (2023) and of two special journal issues: one on gender embodiment, for Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (2024), and one on fashion in global media cultures, for Feminist Media Histories (2026). He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Fashion Studies, is one of the founding editorial members of Manchester University Press's "Fashioning Change: Culture, Environment, Society" series, and is an active member of  the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the College Art Association (CAA), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA).

In the Media Studies department, his BA and MA courses cover a range of topics, including: global media cultures; visual culture; fashion and identity; and popular culture in the Arab world. Graduate students and PhD applicants interested in doing research in any of these fields are welcome to reach out.