Hello, I’m Valentina
I am a cultural and political sociologist who studies civic inclusion, religion, togetherness, and issues of representation in U.S. public life. My multiple-award winning research has been published in Social Problems, Sociology of Religion, and the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. My work has received numerous grants, including the American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and the Luce-American Academy of Religion Advancing Public Scholarship Grant.
I received my PhD in June 2026 from the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. My dissertation, titled “Imagining Inclusion: How Muslim Advocates Craft Public Images in U.S. Civic Life,” explores how American Muslim advocates project civic membership in the U.S. amidst the maze of multiple exclusions that cast Muslims as religious, ethnic, and racial “Others.” I offer the concept of inclusion projects to capture the interactional ways in which different hegemonic narratives are implicitly adopted or discarded by advocates. The theoretical argument where I offer this concept is currently at an advanced stage of review at the American Sociological Review.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where I work with Dr. Diane Winston on a Templeton Religion Trust-funded study of religious change in the United States since 2000, examining how religious life has shifted across four American cities, including Los Angeles.
In my previous published research, I investigated how American Muslims bridge religious differences in U.S. civic settings and how they use Islamic religious meanings to make sense of their civic engagement while navigating their non-dominant religious status in the U.S. All my work broadly contributes to theorizing the possibilities for and limits of inclusion in civic cultures embedded in religious, racial, and ethnic marginalizations.
I am the first in my family to attend college. Before joining the department of Sociology at USC, I obtained a BA and an MA in Arabic from Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, the city where I was born and raised. I subsequently earned an MA in Nationalism Studies with Advanced Certificate in Religious Studies from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. Between my studies, I have spent various periods of time living, working, and studying in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. I owe my research interests and intellectual curiosity to such experiences which have shaped me both as a scholar committed to studying inclusion and as a human being open to submerging myself in cultural spaces so different yet simultaneously so similar to mine.
