I am a tenured Assistant Professor (UD1) of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Before joining TU Delft, I was an International Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Philosophy, Wuhan University, China, and a recipient of the 2019 China International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship. I completed my doctorate degree in Political Philosophy in June 2018 at the King’s College London and the National University of Singapore Joint Ph.D. programme.
My research concerns Comparative Political Theory, Western Political Theory, Contemporary Confucian Political Theory, and Democratic Theory. I am particularly interested in the role of political leaders in democracy, the concepts of political meritocracy, political and democratic leadership, political equality, and methodological issues in non-Western political theory. My first book, Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory, was published this year by Oxford University Press.
I am originally from Italy (with family ties in India), but since 2013 I have lived and worked in Singapore, London, Wuhan, and the Netherlands. Although I have spent most of my time in Singapore in the past ten years, my frequent moving back and forth from East Asia to Europe exposed me to different philosophical traditions, academic debates, and, ultimately, radically different political and cultural contexts.