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. Before joining UvA in 2023, he taught in the UK, the US, and Canada. 

Dr. Filippello's interdisciplinary research looks at how dress and textiles have been used in various historical contexts, particularly across SWANA and Southern Europe, 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 October 2026 with University of California Press. Currently he is working on two new projects: the first (provisionally titled Crossdressed: The Fabric of War on the Middle East) attends to military crossdressing and forced undressing as forms of colonial, libidinal, gendered violence historically enacted by western imperial forces across West Asia, from the 1970s in Lebanon to the early 2000s in Iraq to the present in Gaza; 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 shows how art, fashion, and architecture zines in the region have unearthed minoritized histories, feelings, and ways of being in common.

Dr. Filippello's scholarly work has been published in a wide range of journals, including Feminist Studies,  Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Third Text, Criticism, Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, ​​and Fashion Theory. He is Co-Editor of International Journal of Fashion Studies and a 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 style cultures for Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (2024), and one on fashion as media for Feminist Media Histories (2026).

His courses and seminars, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, include: global media; queer visual cultures; fashion and identity; popular culture in the Arab world; and the aesthetics of counter/surveillance. Graduate students and PhD applicants interested in conducting research in any of these areas are welcome to reach out.