Edoardo Pelligra’s (he/him/his) doctoral research challenges the essentialization of queerness as a discourse centered on non-heteronormative sexuality and its sedimentation into fixed modes of representation. Drawing primarily on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of representation, his project explores more elusive, non-indexical, and often unintelligible gestures through which queerness is evoked in screen media. His objects of inquiry include New French Extremity cinema; the appropriation of surveillance technologies by experimental artists such as Zach Blas, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Pierre Huyghe; and the destabilization of form through the intersection of camp and queer aesthetics in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.
As a parallel area of interest, Edoardo is examining how Italy’s colonial past haunts the post–Second World War period through intricate trajectories of displacement, hesitation, and disallowance. He contends that avant-garde films from the 1960s offer a privileged entry point for observing the unique unfolding of Italy’s colonial memory—one that, in the aftermath of the fascist regime, condenses around blind spots, vanishes into silence, and reappears in unexpected yet evocative forms at the margins of representation.
Research Interests Queer theory, French critical theory, Gilles Deleuze and non-representational thought, aesthetics of moving images, queer experimental cinema, Jacques Derrida and hauntology studies, Édouard Glissant and opacity, surveillance art and surveillance studies.
Publications Pelligra, E. (under review) “Spectrality and Disfiguration: Colonial Hauntings in the Experimental Cinema of Bacigalupo and Orsini,” Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, Special Issue No. 44, “Cinematic Worlds as Decolonial Practices,” edited by Daniele Rugo and Marco Benoît Carbone. Milano: Milano University Press. Pelligra, E. (2025) “Bodies without Organs in Bertrand Mandico’s Cinema: Exploring Sexuality and Desire in a Post-Gender World,” in Padva, G. and Maimon, Y. (eds.), Personified Body Parts in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture. London & New York: Routledge. Pelligra, E. (2023) “Eugenie Brinkema’s Life-Destroying Diagrams: Review,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 3(1), pp. 201–206. Vancouver: Open Humanities Press.
Conference Presentations PAMLA–Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, San Francisco, 2025 Aberrations, University of California Los Angeles, 2025 (Panel Chair) PAMLA–Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Palm Springs, 2024 PITS–Society for the Study of Affect Conference, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Lancaster, 2024 SCMS–Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Boston, 2024 First Forum Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2023 PAMLA–Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, UCLA, Los Angeles, 2022 First Forum Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2022
Awards and Honors Kemp R. Niver Scholarship in Film History at UCLA Army Archerd Fellowship in Theater, Film and Television (UCLA) UCLA TFT Executive Board Scholarship UCLA Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award Summer Mentorship Research Fellowship at UCLA
Education Ph.D., Cinema and Media Studies, University of California Los Angeles (in progress) M.A., Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom (Distinction) Erasmus Visiting Fellowship, German Philosophy, Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena, Germany (First Honors) B. Phil., Philosophy, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy (First Class Honors)