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.

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 project, Crossdressed: Fashion and Beauty at the Edge of Politics (working title), examines transvestite practices within and at the margins of political movements in the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe.

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 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 is a regular reviewer for top-tier journals in gender and sexuality studies and media studies, 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 cultures; fashion, gender, and politics; popular culture in the Middle East; and queer visual culture.