Michela Ardizzoni

I am an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian and an affiliated faculty member in Media Studies. I hold a PhD in Media Studies from Indiana University Bloomington and an MA in American Studies from the University of Iowa. My research examines how artists and media makers contest dominant narratives of race, citizenship, and belonging in Italy and across the Mediterranean. I focus particularly on Afro-Italian artistic practices, feminist cultural production, and the relationship between media and social change. My recent work considers how visual art, media, literature, and performance reclaim histories obscured by colonial archives and national narratives. My forthcoming book approaches refusal as a generative practice through which Afro-Italian women artists create new forms of memory, relation, and futurity.

 

I direct the interdisciplinary Certificate in Art and Social Change, which invites students to examine how artistic practices engage questions of justice, equality, and community across different cultural and geographic contexts. At the undergraduate level, I teach Italian Cinema, Social Change in the Arts, and Conversations in Italian Cinema. My graduate courses include Feminist Media Studies, Public and Engaged Humanities, and Contemporary Documentaries and Social Change.
 

Archives of Futurity: Afro-Italian Imaginaries and Poetics of Refusal. Liverpool University Press, Transnational Italian Cultures series. Forthcoming, 2027.

Matrix Activism: Global Practices of Resistance. Routledge, 2017.

Mediterranean Encounters in the City: Frameworks of Mediation between East and West, North and South. Co-edited with Valerio Ferme. Lexington Books, 2015.

Beyond Monopoly: Globalization and Contemporary Italian Media. Co-edited with Chiara Ferrari. Lexington Books, 2010.

North/South, East/West: Mapping Italianness on Television. Lexington Books, 2007.
 

“Unwriting the Script: Wissal Houbabi and the Aesthetics of Epistemic Refusal.” Gender/Sexuality/Italy. Forthcoming.

“Rooted Resistance: Landscape as Decolonial Praxis in Binta Diaw’s Art.” In Italy Is Made: Global Landscapes of the Italian Diaspora, edited by Derek Duncan and Michele Monserrati. Palgrave. Forthcoming.

“Afro-Italian Voices: Podcasting and Sonic Resistance” European Journal of Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2026): 46–62.

“Building Space for Belonging: The Critical Race, Diasporas, and Migrations Caucus (CRDM)” Co-authored. Forum Italicum 57, no. 2 (2023): 476–487.

“Il viaggio non è un ritorno: la proposta culturale di Elia Moutamid.” Co-authored. In Religioni dappertutto: Simboli, immagini, sconfinamenti, edited by Carlo Nardella. Rome: Carocci, 2023.

“Imag(in)ing Blackness in Italy: Redactions, Presence, and Media in Antonio Dikele Distefano’s Work” Italian Culture 39, no. 2 (2022): 223–239.

“Laughing at the Other: Muslims in Italian Comedies.” In Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, edited by Kristian Petersen, 101–114. Harvard University Press, 2021.

“On Rhythms and Rhymes: Poetics of Identity in Postcolonial Italy.” Communication, Culture & Critique 13, no. 1 (2020): 1–16.

“Feminist Citizenship in the Banlieue: Houda Benyamina’s Divines (2016).” In Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America: Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration, edited by Ramona Mielusel and Simona Emilia Pruteanu, 135–149. Palgrave, 2020.