Abridged CV

Academic Appointments
2022 – present: Assistant Professor of Black Studies and the Archive
Faculty of Information (iSchool), University of Toronto
Affiliated Faculty, Women’s & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI)

2018 – 2022: Assistant Professor, UCLA
Department of Gender Studies
Department of African American Studies

2017 – 2019: UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Irvine
Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies (2017 – 2018)
Department of Anthropology (2018 – 2019)

Education
PhD – History of Consciousness – UC Santa Cruz
Designated emphases in Literature & Feminist Studies

MA (Hons.) – History of Consciousness – UC Santa Cruz

Certificate in Italian Language, Corso di perfezionamento, (CEFR: C1/ILR4)
Alma Mater Studiorium Università di Bologna

Res.Cert. – Italian and Gender & Women’s Studies – UC Berkeley

BA/MA – Russian Philology and Italian Literature (Hons.) – City University of New York

Certificate in Italian Language & Semiotics – Erasmus mundus Programme
Alma Mater Studiorium Università di Bologna

Research Appointments & Fellowships
2021 – pres. Senior Fellow, Center for Applied Transgender Studies
2021 – 2022: American Academy of Rome “Rome Prize” for Modern Italian Studies
2019: “On the Matter of Blackness in Europe,” UCHRI Conference Grant
2017: “Queer of Color Formations and Translocal Spaces in Europe” @ UCHRI (Winter)
2016 – 2018: Co-PI for “Queer Italia Network,” £60,000 AHRC (UK) grant
2016 – 2017: Academic Fellow,  Department of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara
2016 – 2017: “Where Blackness Meets the Sea” funded by Black Studies Consortium
2016 – 2017: Co-PI for Black Studies: Vocabularies and Genealogies @ UCHRI
2015 – 2016: Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research
—  (Centres for Cultural Memory and Women’s Writing), University of London
2015 – 2016: Visiting Researcher, Medieval and Modern Languages, Cambridge
2014 – 2015: Research Assistant for Professor Angela Y. Davis
2013 – 2015: Graduate Student Researcher for Professor Gina Dent

Teaching

  • University of California, Los Angeles
    • Spring 2021: Black and Migrant Imaginaries (undergraduate)
    • Winter 2021: Blackness and Borderscapes (graduate)
    • Winter 2021: Black Trans Poetics (undergraduate)
    • Fall 2020: Black Poetics, Black Future(s) (PhD reading seminar)
    • Winter 2020: Black Migrants & Movements (Fiat Lux course, UG)
    • Winter 2020: Black and Migration Literature (undergraduate)
    • Winter 2020: Blackness and Borderscapes (grad seminar)
    • Fall 2019: Blackness and Indigeneity in Europe (MA/upper division UG
  •  Other Institutions (selected)
    • Spring 2017: BLST 191DS – The Black Mediterranean (UC Santa Barbara)
    • Summer 2016: CRES 60E – Black Europe (UC Santa Cruz)

Languages

Italian (fluent)

German (intermediate)

French (proficient)

Arabic (adv. beginner)

Russian (degree level)

Spanish (intermediate)

Latin (reading)

Somali ( beginner)

Teaching Areas
Black Europe, diasporic archives, black/migration literature, anticolonialism, trans poetics, black geographies, black feminisms, and transdisciplinary black method(s)

Research Interests
Black Mediterranean, literary imagination, citizenship & the law, cultural memory, black trans poetics, archives of black nonbinary possibility, black genders, and black belonging