Dr Alice Parrinello
Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2024 - June 2025
Home Institution: University of Oxford
Alice Parrinello was recently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, investigating postcolonial and environmental films for the Wellcome-Trust funded project “After the End” in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI). She completed her PhD/DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2024 with a thesis on the films and plays by Sicilian director Emma Dante through the lens of queer theory. Alice's research engaged with questions of temporality, spectrality, kinship, ecofeminism, and homonationalism in Dante's works and argued that a queer and Southern epistemology is taking place. Her published work includes articles that have appeared in gender/sexuality/Italy, Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, and Simultanea: A journal of Italian Media and Pop Culture, among others.
Project Title: Water Trouble: Queer Bodies and Fluidity in the Mediterranean
The project seeks to investigate the relationship between queer bodies and the Mediterranean in contemporary cinema. In particular, it argues that, while the Mediterranean has been recently constructed as Europe’s necropolitical border, there is currently a re-politicisation of the Sea, which appears as a place of queer resistance, reclamation, and transformation in recent films. The main case study is Italy. “Water Trouble” aims to address urgent questions, such as the extent of our embodied engagement with the environment, the porous nature of borders, and the possible re-politicisation of the Mediterranean. Previous socio-economic reasons to migrate are now accompanied by an environmental element, as climate change effects are currently affecting more the Global South than the Global North. Hence, an epistemological reconfiguration of the Mediterranean and Central Europe’s relationship with it is now more needed than ever.