Simone Pellegrino (he/him) is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research investigates the contemporary engagement with notions of fate and fortune across a range of cultural practices, and the tension between capitalist-hegemonic and emancipatory opportunities this reveals.
From the connotations of luck, fate and (mis)fortune in both mainstream and online media texts, to the perception of the peculiarly entropic, non-deterministic functioning of large language models (LLMs) in generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) that turns the machine into an oracle-like medium, he draws on continental philosophy to examine the ordinary experience of fate and fortune as socio-cultural meanings of the 21st century. His study aims to fathom the intrinsic affective discourse these "oracular" cultural practices elicit. The equal horizons of novelty and possibility they project, and the magical explanation they provide for past unpredictable occurrences, are closely inspected vis-à-vis their condensed surrogation of linearity, which facilitates sense-making in an age of contingency and uncertainty where historicity has been so attenuated that existence unfolds as if forever suspended in the present. Therefore, a new critique of late capitalism is proposed, which focuses on both risks and opportunities presented by affective discourses of fate and fortune in a post-postmodern, or meta-modern, structure of feeling. Core themes include temporality, space, consciousness, affect and desire. His research has been presented at academic conferences in Europe and the United States. At 23, Simone is currently the youngest candidate in the Graduate School, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Alongside his PhD-related activities, Simone serves as an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, where he teaches the module Embodiment and Experience (co-convened by Prof Lisa Blackman and Dr Louise Chambers, and originally designed by Prof Sara Ahmed), and the module Social Media in Everyday Life (convened by Prof Mirca Madianou). He oversees the research dissemination for UIS Research Centre, a pioneering, student-led think tank producing policy papers on Italy's most compelling issues. For the organisation, he also supervised a research team that assessed the current state of Italy’s cultural output. Named "L'Ennesimo Nuovo, Analisi e Proposte per una Cultura del Futuro" (The New, Again: Analyses and Proposals for a Culture of the Future), the project used Deleuzian ideas to question the nation's ability to effectively foster a culture which resists the current zeitgeist and, most importantly, offers pathways to a viable creation of a post-identitarian future.
Simone serves as the PhD Rep in the Research, Knowledge Exchange Action Group for the School of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. He chairs Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Postgraduate Network. He oversaw the 2025 MeCCSA PGN Conference Committee, where he was responsible for organising an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersection of media and instability. He assisted with the ‘21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture’, a symposium hosted by MCCS department at Goldsmiths, which fostered a cross-disciplinary interchange on spiritual practices with scholars from other internationally leading institutions, such as MIT (USA), Rutgers University (USA), Concordia University (Canada), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland).
As part of his undergraduate studies, completed in 2023, he specialised in both mobile and print journalism with a training in news and feature writing, sub-editing and fact-checking. He collaborated with fellow students to create Blurr, an online magazine that explored the concept of the other. He was picked as the co-editor of Tablecloth, a cultural magazine whose first printed issue was published in March 2023. He did a work placement with the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service partner, Epsom and Ewell Times, a not-for-profit publication in Surrey, England. His journalistic work also appeared on The Tab and EastLondonLines.
Simone was born and raised in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot shape, where the branches of centuries-old olive trees sway at the pace of sea waves. Before moving to London, he worked for an Italian radio station, where he strengthened his knowledge of audio writing, broadcasting and editing while working alongside senior producers.