My interdisciplinary research centres on the artist as political thinker and art as a source of global political thought.

My doctoral dissertation (“Civilization as an Aesthetic Concept: Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, and Juan Luna, 1798-1903”) explains how a late eighteenth-century Enlightenment sensibility of civilizational critique and imperial scepticism came to be appropriated by a group of painters during the long nineteenth century—a period which has generally been characterized as the apex of European feelings of civilizational superiority and imperial liberalism. It examines how three major nineteenth-century artists—the French painters Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and the Filipino painter Juan Luna (1857-1899)—probed in their artistic expressions the critical possibilities of the Enlightenment-born concept of civilization.

The thesis makes two primary interventions. First, to put Delacroix, Gauguin, and Luna in conversation with, respectively, Friedrich Schiller, Denis Diderot, and José Rizal is to reveal a buried treasure: a culturally pluralist, humanist, and anti-imperialist imaginary of civilization as an aesthetic concept that now seems of urgent value, as discourses of civilization, barbarism, and savagery have taken on newfound importance both within the West and beyond it. Through a global aesthetic lens, it argues for the continued relevance of alternative strands of Enlightenment-era political thought that challenged prevailing discourses of civilization and empire. Second, and most importantly, the dissertation is a contribution to sources and methods in political theory. Artists, including painters, have been directly involved in political battles: not only have they summarized existing political arguments and presented them more persuasively or attractively, but they have also expressed, including in pictorial forms, political thought that was original in its historical context. Drawing on speech act theory, it thus makes a contextualist argument about the under-theorization of art in the field that ought to engage with both textual and visual sources.

I previously obtained an M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from LUISS University in Rome.

In recent years my research has been supported by the Fondazione Einaudi (Turin), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Samsom Graduate Student Scholarship for Studies in the History of Ideas

Before joining academia, I was a professionally trained concert pianist and this background in the fine arts deeply informs my academic research.