Mario D'Amato

Mario D'Amato is a Ph.D. student originally from San Francisco, California. His historical interests include the history of popular culture, queer history, and American history from the nineteenth century to the present. He earned both his B.A. and M.A. in History from San Francisco State University in 2022 & 2025, respectively. Mario served as one of the managing editors of the history department's student-run journal, Ex Post Facto, at San Francisco State, for its 2025 volume. 

 

Mario wrote his M.A. Thesis on the Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest, which delved into the political nature of the self-described apolitical song contest through performance, voting patterns, and the songs themselves. He has written two other papers on Eurovision, examining the perceived notion that voters are sympathetic to countries at war, and another paper on sex, sexuality, and gender at the contest through a cultural anthropological and historical lens. Mario has given undergraduate presentations on the intersections of queerness and the horror gene, the emerging gene of internet horror, as well as on how the AIDS crisis served as a flashpoint for modern queer culture of television.