Serena’s research and teaching interests lie in the areas of gender studies, international law & development, feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, labour and social security, finance and digital technologies. Serena has published on gender equality in international law, law and development, feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, international economic law, digital financial inclusion and the governance of digital technologies. Serena is the author of The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, Routledge 2020) and has coordinated the project ‘Feminist Recovery Plans for Covid-19 and Beyond: Learning from Grassroots Activism’. She is currently working on the research project ‘Transnational Social (In)Security in the Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution’ for which she has been awarded the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) EC Fellowship. 

After obtaining her Law degree from the University of Siena in Italy with an academic year spent as an Erasmus visiting student at the University of Bristol Law School (2007), Serena completed a MA degree (taught+research) in European and International Studies at the University of Trento, School of International Studies (2010). Serena was awarded a PhD in Law and Socio-Legal Studies in 2016 from Kent Law School, University of Kent, where she was the recipient of the Postgraduate Research Scholarship and served for three years on the steering committee of the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice. Serena also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2019. Prior to joining Warwick in October 2020, Serena was a Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at Brunel Law School (2018-2020), a Postdoctoral Researcher at King’s College London (2017-2018) and an Associate Lecturer and Researcher at Kent Law School (2011-2018). Besides academia, Serena worked for the Migration and Asylum unit of the Permanent Representation of Italy to the EU (2010) and for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Brussels (2011) and collaborated with various feminist organisations in Italy, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Brazil.

Serena is on the steering committee of GLOBE and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender (CSWG) at Warwick, and she is also part of the Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches International Network and the IEL Collective.

Serena is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Law in Context, Cambridge University Press.