Biography

Gaia Giuliani is an Italian pioneer of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies and an anti-racist feminist activist and scholar. She is a political philosopher and a permanent Associate Researcher at IHC - NOVA FCSH/IN2PAST. In Italy, she also holds the title of Associate Professor in Political Philosophy (2018) and in Cinema, Television and Audio-Visual Media (2025). She was awarded her PhD by the University of Turin in 2005 and has since worked at the Universities of Bologna, Technology Sydney, Cambridge, and Coimbra (Centre for Social Studies). She has also collaborated as a research associate and visiting scholar with the Universities of Padua, Leeds, London, Fordham, and Venice Ca' Foscari. Gaia is the author of several monographs, including Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique (Routledge, 2021; forthcoming in Spanish with Katakrak); Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), finalist and joint fifth place for the Edinburgh Gadda Prize 2019; Zombie, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall'11 settembre ai giorni nostri (Le Monnier-Mondadori Education, 2016; forthcoming re-edition with Meltemi); Bianco e nero. Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani, with Dr Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Monnier-Mondadori Education, 2013), winner of the American Association for Italian Studies prize in the 20th-21st century category; and Beyond Curiosity (Aracne, 2008). Her research aims to deconstruct (post-)colonial intersectional visual archives of monstrosity through the analysis of texts encoding "fears of disasters and crises" and their symbolic and material impact on European and Western modern and contemporary history and self-representations. She regularly delivers keynote addresses, lectures, and seminars at universities across Portugal, the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. Her work is widely assigned as required reading in Social Sciences and Humanities courses, including at the Universities of Milan Bicocca, Roma Tre, Bergamo, Siena, Bologna, Ca' Foscari & IUAV Venice, Napoli L'Orientale, Geneva, Kent, NYU, and Princeton.