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, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the recipient of a Marie Curie Global Fellowship hosted at the University of Melbourne.

Dr. Filippello's interdisciplinary research looks at how fashion has 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, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist systems, and ultimately carve out alternative aesthetic imaginaries. He is currently completing his first monograph, Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine (under contract with University of California Press). His next research projects are: Fashion Spills: Dress and Oil at the Frontiers of Extraction, which tracks the development of textile-based practices across the larger Mediterranean and Middle East in the face of extractive capitalism; and Crossdressed: Beauty at the Edge of Politics, a cultural history and theory of transvestism.

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 Visual Culture, 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 transgender embodiment, for Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (2024), and one on fashion in global media cultures, for Feminist Media Histories (2025). He sits on the editorial board of Manchester University Press's "Reframing Fashion" series, and is an active member of academic organizations such as 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; fashion, gender, and politics; popular culture in the Arab world; and queer visual cultures. Graduate students and PhD applicants interested in doing research in any of these areas are welcome to reach out.