GA (Guilherme) Giolo Rego, MSc

Biography

Once described as “a promising scholar of things my generation doesn’t understand” by a senior colleague, Guilherme researches internet culture and the strange ways people make meaning online. He is particularly interested in how seemingly mundane digital content (memes, aesthetics, influencers, lifestyle trends, and the countless things we doomscroll past half-asleep) shapes how people understand themselves, others, and the world around them.

Much of his work explores the entanglement between culture and politics. Particularly, how reactionary ideas travel through everyday online spaces, becoming entangled with dating, relationship advice, nostalgia, and lifestyle content. Guilherme's research has examined topics including internet aesthetics, tradwives, the manosphere, cancel culture, and the growing tendency for ideology to circulate through forms of content that do not appear political at all.

Guilherme is especially drawn to moments when digital culture becomes uncanny, poetic, or existential: when memes are used to reflect on the passage of time; when online communities transform private frustrations into collective identities; when people turn to playlists, fandoms, aesthetics, and sometimes problematic ideologies to make sense of who they are and where they belong.

His research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals including Continuum, M/C Journal, and First Monday. He has been a guest researcher at the University of Copenhagen, an associate researcher at KU Leuven, and has taught at Erasmus University Rotterdam since 2020. Before joining Erasmus University Rotterdam, Guilherme received a received a BA degree in communication sciences from the University of Pavia. 

When not teaching or writing, Guilherme hoards browser tabs on internet phenomena that are usually outdated by the time he returns to them.