I graduated (with honors) from the University of Milan in Italian Literature and I earned a PhD in History of Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Pisa in 2009.

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In 2008, while I was still a doctorate candidate, I taught a course as adjunct professor at University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland of Lugano, and in 2010 at Collegio delle Università Milanesi of Milan. From 2014 to 2017 I held a post-doc fellowship at University of Milan, where I was appointed Lecturer in Film Studies in 2017, Senior Lecturer in 2019 and Associate Professor in 2022, and where I teach Film History and Criticism and Cinema and Cultural Studies.

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In 2018 I obtained the National Scientific Qualification for the position of Full Professor.

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I have published seven books and forty articles, and I presented more than thirty papers at international Symposiums. I translated in Italian Parker Tyler's first book, Hollywood Hallucination (1944), and with T. Subini I edited a special issue of the Journal Schermi on Catholics, cinema and sexuality, and I organized a Symposium on censorship. I also organized panels for international Symposiums held in Milan (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart) and Canterbury (University of Kent).

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I’m the P.I. of the 2022 PRIN (Reasearch Project of National Interest) Cinema and the LGBTQ+ movements, from the first traces to institutionalization (1945-1989) funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research,.and previously I participated to three other PRIN projects (2008, 2012, 2015),

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I am editor (with F. Vitella and G. Maina) of the journal Schermi, editor (with T. Subini) of the series “Analisi filmica e ricerca storica” published by UTET, member of the editorial advisory board of the series "Biblioteca / Cinema, media e studi culturali" published by Meltemi.

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Between 2005 and 2012, I focused my research on Luchino Visconti, mingling cultural studies and philology to reconsider his work and image as an author through a close inspection of his papers. I particularly aimed at revaluating the transgressive component of his poetics, deeply intertwined with sexuality, as the center of an aesthetic project which since the first works had combined realism with melodrama, charging private life with a political meaning, which was a disruptive way of thinking for a communist intellectual at the time in Italy.

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In parallel, I broadened the scope of the research on the connection between cinema and sexuality in relation to both art films and popular cinema, to the extent of the borderline genre of pornography. In particular, I devoted two books to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and to its influence, trying to explain its extraordinary success in relation to a narrative model based on an original revision of the romantic couple love/death obtained mingling non-hegemonic forms of sexuality on the background of psychoanalytic medicalization.

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When, in 2014, Palgrave MacMillan approached me with the proposal of a book, I focused on an aspect still disregarded by film scholars, that is the relationship between homosexuality and Italian cinema. A relationship conceived not just in terms of representations, but as an intricate network of negotiations between dominant knowledge, popular notions and cinematic representations themselves, involving all the aspects of cinema institution, from industry to audience, censorship, criticism, and star system.

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The resulting Homosexuality and Italian Cinema is based on new archival research and on a large amount of a press that can be considered marginal as for its political side or the readers targeted (namely papers produced by the extreme right wing, the extra-parliamentary left, and the gay rights movements). My ongoing research is devoted to this press, neglected but unavoidable to reconstruct a proper cultural history of postwar Italy, in the intent to delve further into the correlation between power and marginality, rule and transgression which is a constant of my research.

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