Dr Federica Mazzara
Federica is a Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster.
She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, awarded in Italy. In 2007, she moved to the UK after receiving the Post-doctoral Mellon Fellowship at University College London (UCL), where she conducted research on migration and culture.
During her time at UCL, she served as coordinator for both the BA in Language and Culture and the MA in Gender Studies.
Federica joined the University of Westminster in 2015 as a Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication and led the BA in Languages and International Communication for nine years.
Her research interests include:
- Migration and border politics
- Visual culture and representation
- Crisis communication
- Postcolonial and decolonial theory
- Humanitarianism and its critiques
- Transnational activism
- Performance and resistance
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); and is acting as Co-Investigator for the €1.3 million project CMD: The Crisis of Migration Discourse – A Participatory Approach for a New Lexicon of Migration funded by the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE).
From 2019 to 2023, she 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).
She is the review editor for the journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture (Intellect).
