Francesca Maria Villani

Francesca Maria Villani is a PhD candidate in Gender studies at University of Bari, with a background in contemporary and feminist philosophies. She is also classical concert pianist. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Towards a Decolonial Politics of Listening: Sound Epistemologies and Practices of Resistance in Afro-Diasporic Composers, focuses on the works of Afro-diasporic composers, investigating the mechanisms of exclusion embedded in musical language and exploring the potential for their deconstruction. The research work adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates feminist and decolonial studies as well as musical analysis.

She has presented her work in several international conferences, and contributes to the connection between theory and practice by actively engaging in mixed forms of cultural dissemination such as lecture-concerts.

She was a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki (March-June 2025) and at the University of Oslo (October-December 2025).