Dr Federica Mazzara
Federica is Reader in Cultural Studies in the UoW School of Humanities.
She was educated in Italy. In 2000-01 she studied for an MA in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Essex. She returned to Italy to commence studies for her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Naples and combined her doctoral research with work as a research assistant at the University of Palermo. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 2007 with a dissertation on the "Double works" of the Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 2007 she was offered a two-year Post-doctoral Mellon Fellowship at UCL with a research project on migration and culture. In 2009 she became Senior Teaching Fellow at UCL where she was also the Programme Director for the BA Language and Culture (2010-2015) and the MA Gender Society and Representation (2010-2013). She joined Westminster in September 2015.
Federica is the Course Leader for the BA Languages and Global Communication and BA English Language and Global Communication.
Her research interests include:
- migration
- art and politics
- media and communication
Her current research interrogates contemporary concerns in Europe regarding migration as represented in cultural practices.
She is the author of Reframing Migration: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle and Aesthetics of Subversion (Peter Lang, 2019), which explores how activist and art forms have become a platform for subverting the dominant narrative of migration and generating a vital form of political dissent.
Federica is currently working on a book project titled Mocking the Border: Carnivalesque Resistance in Times of Migration
She is involved in several interdisciplinary projects on migration, including a collective writing project called Minor Keywords of Political Theory: Migration as a Critical Standpoint (2021). She leads the British Academy Project 'Migrants in Transit: A Transdisciplinary Writing Programme for Emerging Scholars of Migration in Tunisia' (2023-2025). Federica was one of the Scientific Co-ordinators of the Erasmus + Project MIGRANT - Master Degree in Migration Studies: Governance, Policies and Cultures in Tunisia (2019-2023).
Federica is the review editor of the journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture (Intellect.)