Milena Belloni

Biography

Milena BelloniMilena Belloni is an ethnographer specialized in migration and refugee studies. Before her FWO Fellowship, she was a Post-doctoral researcher in the ERC HOMInG Project at the University of Trento, a fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a Post-doctoral researcher in refugee studies at the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS, Antwerp). In 2015 she gained her PhD in Sociology and Social Research in Trento. In 2016 her thesis “Cosmologies of Destinations: roots and routes of Eritrean forced migration towards Europe” won the Maria Baganha IMISCOE 2016 Award for the best doctoral dissertation in migration studies.

Milena has conducted extensive fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Italy and Holland. Her research mainly concern refugees’ migration dynamics and integration pathways, transnational refugee families, migrant smuggling, and ethnographic methods. She published in many international peer reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Her monographic study on the migration of Eritreans to Europe, The Big Gamble, is published by the University of California Press (2019). For more information on her work see https://unitn.academia.edu/MilenaBelloni