Angelica Pesarini

Assistant Professor

angelica.pesarini@utoronto.ca

Campus

Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Cross-Appointments

Department of Italian Studies

Areas of Interest

Black Italia, Black Europe and the Black Mediterranean
Colonial and (post)colonial Italy
Racialization of the political discourse on immigration
Oral sources, diasporic memories, and counter-narratives
Difficult heritage and resignification of public spaces
Race and “mixed” race
Black Feminist Thought and Black Feminist Epistemology
Afro- descendent Cultural Production

Biography

Angelica Pesarini is an Assistant Professor in Race and Cultural Studies/Race and Diaspora and Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work seeks to expand the field of Black Italia focusing on dynamics of race, gender, identity, and citizenship. She is interested in the racialization of the political discourse on immigration, and she is among the co-founders of The Black Mediterranean Collective, which published The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She wrote several essays, peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and delivered numerous talks and public lectures internationally. She is the author of a short story in Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (Future. Tomorrow narrated by today’s voices, 2019), an anthology written by eleven Italian women of African descent, and she co-translated into Italian Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Blues Legacies and Black feminism by Angela Y. Davis. Angelica is currently writing a book on the lived experience of Black “mixed race” Italian women during the (post)colonial fascist period in East Africa, and the use of oral sources as counter-narratives. As a scholar- activist, she is engaged in the Italian anti-racist movement, and she is investigating the impacts of BLM in Italy.