Maya De Leo (she/they) holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pisa and is an Adjunct Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Bologna. She has been an Adjunct Professor of Gender History at the University of Genoa (2017 and 2018) and of History of Homosexuality at the University of Turin (2018/2022). She also taught LGBTQIA+ History at the University of Trento and at the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori of Padua.

Her research interests focus on LGBT+ cultural history and queer theory: she has published numerous contributions on these topics in scholarly journals and collected volumes.

For her doctoral dissertation on the representations of homosexuality in the Long XIXth Century she won the Equal Opportunity Commission of the University of Pisa Award for the best PhD dissertation in Gender Studies (2007) and the “Maria Baiocchi” Award for the best PhD dissertation in LGBT Studies (2007). She received the Emma Goldman Snowball Award (2022) and her book, Queer. Storia culturale della comunità LGBT+ (Einaudi, 2021), won the 2022 SISSCO (Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History) prize for best first work.