Speaker bio:
Dr Elena Zambelli is a sociologist with expertise in gender, sexuality, race, migration and social inequalities.
Elena's main research interests pivot on the commodification and regulation of intimacy. In her first book, Sexscapes of Pleasure: Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy (2023, Berghahn Books), Elena explores how Italian and migrant women negotiate the tension between sexuality and status across a continuum of spaces of sexualized leisure and sex work. In her postdoctoral research, Elena expanded her research remit to explore the role of national and racialized borders in the construction of hierarchies of normative and undesirable intimacies - first, at Vrije Universiteit, within the ERC Consolidator Grant project ‘Regulating Mixed Relationships in Europe (EUROMIX)’, and subsequently at Lancaster University, as part of the ESRC-funded project ‘Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN)’. Elena is currently working on two book projects: the co-edited volume Regulating Interracialized Intimacies: European and Global Perspectives, which will be published by Routledge (2025), and her second research monograph (provisionally) entitled Mixing in Europe: An Ethnography of Black-White Interraciality, which will be published by Manchester University Press (2026).
Elena's academic career builds on her fifteen years' international development work experience as Gender Expert for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, international NGOs, such as Oxfam, and UN agencies, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa region (occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia). This experience underpins her work at SOAS in the EU-FP7-funded research ‘Power to Youth’ project, and before that, the first book she co-edited, Women Networking Across Borders: Cooperation, Diaspora and Migrations between Italy and the Middle East. More recently, Elena established the Bianca Pomeranzi Prize, of which she is the President. The initiative supports the employability of Italian university-based master students graduating with a dissertation pivoting on innovative feminist and gender approaches to local and international development. Numerous organizations promote and support it, including UNFPA, the Italian Agency for International Cooperation, and Oxfam Italy.