Biography
I graduated summa cum laude from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, where my work focused on early modern, more specifically mannerist, iconography and iconology. I then completed an Eighteenth Century Studies MA at the University of Sheffield, where my dissertation examining political women’s dress during the French Revolution has been awarded a Petrie Watson Exhibition Prize.
My current project sets out to investigate Renaissance women’s embodied experiences and sartorial practices, revealing how they shaped contemporary conceptions of femininity. I am particularly interested in the emergence of a female sport culture in early modern Europe. I am chiefly intrigued by the issue of embodiment, and the opportunity for cultural historians to apply a ‘corporealist critique’ which challenges discourse theory and explores the complex braiding of culture and embodied cognition. More specifically, I am interested in how the construction of gendered identities is rooted in the body’s materiality and corporeally performed. In this perspective, I study fashion as a situated bodily practice which provides ‘technologies of the body’ essential to the performance of identity and gender.
Other Professional Activities:
I am a co-convenor of the 'Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network'
I am the organiser of the 'Fashioning the Early Modern Courtier' conference at St John's College (16 May 2018)
I am a former co-convenor of the seminar 'Things: Material Cultures of the Early Modern World' at CRASSH (Cambridge)
Teaching:
I supervise undergraduate students for Part I, Paper 16 (Faculty of History, Cambridge)
I was a graduate lecturer for the HAP classes on 'Cultural History' and 'Gender' (Faculty of History, Cambridge)
