Roberto Filippello is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he is also affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to joining UvA in 2023, he taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Edinburgh, and The New School. 

Dr. Filippello's interdisciplinary research looks at how dress and textiles have been used in various historical contexts to shape spaces of political expression and community formation. He takes a special interest in how fashion practices (involving design, photography, and video) can function as forms of critique that destabilize colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal systems, and ultimately carve out alternative social imaginaries. His first monograph, Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine, is forthcoming in Fall 2026 with University of California Press. Currently he is working on two new projects: the first (provisionally titled Fashion Spills: Dress and Oil at the Frontiers of Extraction) tracks the evolution of land-based fiber arts  across the Levant in the face of western extractivism; the second (Arab Remix: New Print Media in the Middle East and North Africa) documents the emergence of grassroots-led print media infrastructures in the wake of the Arab uprisings, and elucidates how art, fashion, and architecture zines in the region have unearthed minoritized histories, feelings, and ways of being-in-common.

Dr. Filippello's research has been published or is forthcoming 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 co-editor of the International Journal of Fashion Studies and founding editorial member of Manchester University Press's "Fashioning Change: Culture, Environment, Society" series. He has co-edited the volume Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (2023) and two journal special issues, one on transgender embodiment in beauty cultures for Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (2024), and one on fashion in global media cultures for Feminist Media Histories (2026).

In the Media Studies department, his BA and MA courses cover a range of topics, including: global media culture; queer visual cultures; fashion, media, 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.