I am a sociologist with expertise in gender, sexuality, race, migration and social inequalities. 

My main research interests pivot on the commodification and regulation of intimacy. In my first book, Sexscapes of Pleasure: Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy (2023, Berghahn Books), I explore how Italian and migrant women negotiate the tension between sexuality and status across a continuum of spaces of sexualized leisure and sex work. As a postdoctoral researcher, I have expanded my research remit to explore the role of national and racialized borders in the construction of hierarchies of normative and undesirable intimacies - first, at Vrije Universiteit, within the ERC Consolidator Grant project ‘Regulating Mixed Relationships in Europe (EUROMIX)’, and today, at Lancaster University, as part of the ESRC-funded project ‘Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN)’.

I am currently working on two book projects: the co-edited volume Regulating Empire and Nation: Interracialized Intimacies in Europe and Beyond (Routledge), and my second research monograph (provisionally) entitled Mixing in Europe: An Ethnography of Black-White Interraciality (Manchester University Press).

I have convened and taught in postgraduate and undergraduate modules on gender, migration and human rights across different institutions (Lancaster University, Vrije Universiteit and the University of Bologna), and I have successfully supervised three PhDs to completion with dissertations on the relationship between race, intimacy and the law.

My academic career builds on my fifteen years' international development work as Gender Expert for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, international NGOs, such as Oxfam, and UN agencies, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa region (occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia). This experience underpins the volume I co-edited, which is entitled Women’s Networking Across Borders: Cooperation, Diaspora and Migrations between Italy and the Middle East and my later involvement in the EU-FP7-funded research project Power to Youth. 

More recently, I have established the Bianca Pomeranzi Prize, a multistakeholder initiative supporting the entry into the labour market of master students based at Italian universities who graduate with a dissertation pivoting on innovative gender approaches to local and international development.

I am a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Global Networks; the British Sociological Association; the European Sociological Association - Sexuality Network; the European Sex Workers’ Research Network; the Italian Research Group on Prostitution and Sex Work (GRIPS); the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, and the Race, Religion and Secularism Network. At Lancaster University, I am a member of the Centre of Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities (CASEI) and the Centre for Gender Studies.