Biography

Gaia Giuliani is permanent researcher at CES and Associate professor in Political philosophy (ASN 2017, Italy). She obtained her PhD in History of political ideas at the University of Torino (2005). Since then she has worked at the Universities of Bologna, Technology Sydney, and Cambridge, and collaborated as research associate and visiting scholar with the University of Padua, Leeds, London (Goldsmiths and Birkbeck College), Fordham and Venice "Ca' Foscari". She received 3 postdoctoral fellowships, respectively from the University of Bologna (2007-2009), the University of Technology Sydney (2009-2010) funded by the Australian Government under the scheme Endeavour Research Fellowship, and the Center for Social Studies (CES) (2015-2019), funded by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology [FCT]. Since 2016 she lectures regularly at CES PhD courses and sicne 2022 she integrates the international academic staff of the PhD Programme in "Social Sciences: interactions, communication, and cultural constructions" at FISPPA - University of Padua (Italy). From 2018-2019 she co-coordinates the course "Issues on Sociology of Politics and Democracy" (MA in Sociology) at the Faculty of Economics (FEUC) of the University of Coimbra. Her methodology crosses History of Political Ideas, Political Philosophy, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Cultural and Gender Studies. Her research project at CES (2019-) aims at a critical discourse analysis of texts coding racialised and gendered monstrosity and 'fears of disasters and crisis' and their symbolic and material impact in the context of the War on terror, the so-called migrant and refugee crises, and the crise of European and Western self-representation. In 2018, she became Principal investigator of the FCT-funded three-year project "(De)OTHERING - Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/refugees and 'internal Others' in Portuguese and European mediascapes"(2018-22). Between 2018 and 2022 she also collaborated with the FCT project "DECODEM - (De)Coding Masculinities in Portugal" (2018-22) and since 2021 is associate researcher in the FCT project "UNPOP- UNpacking POPulism: Comparing the formation of emotion narratives and their effects on political behaviour" (2021-2024), both at CES. Since 2020 she is member of the Management Committee of the COST Action CA19129 - Decolonising Development: Research, Teaching and Practice (2020-24). Since 2022 she is a member of the advisory board of the FCT 3 years project "UrbanoScenes. Post-colonial imaginaries of urbanisation: A future-oriented investigation from Portugal and Angola (PTDC/GES-URB/1053/2021). Among her publications, the monographic books "Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene. A postcolonial Critique" (Routledge 2021), "Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture" (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) - Finalist, Fifth place ex-aequo of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize 2019, "Zombie, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall'11 settembre ai giorni nostri" (Le Monnier-Mondadori Education 2016), "Bianco e nero. Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani" with Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Monnier-Mondadori Education 2013) - First prize in the 20th-21st century category by the American Association for Italian Studies, and "Beyond curiosity. La 'History of British India' di James Mill e il governo coloniale britannico in India" (Aracne 2008).