Dr Valentina Mazzucato (V.)

Valentina Mazzucato is Professor of Globalisation & Development and she directs the research programme on Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development.

Her expertise is on migration studied from a transnational perspective. In particular she studies the effects of migration between Africa and Europe on migrants and their families and communities back home. Mazzucato has led 5 international, multi-year projects on transnational migration between Africa and Europe in which she collaborates with European and African universities.

She is Executive Board member of the Maastricht Center for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE). She is on the Steering Committee of NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development and a panel member of the ERC Advanced Grants.

Prof. Mazzucato received a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant for the project Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives: Transnational Youth in Global South and North (MO-TRAYL) which will run from 2017-2022.

Valentina Mazzucato obtained a BA in Political Science and French Literature from Williams College in the USA. She went on to study Agricultural Economics at the MSc level at Michigan State University in the USA and obtained a PhD degree in 2000 from Wageningen Agricultural University (cum laude) from the Department of Tropical Agriculture on the social, cultural and economic dimensions of indigenous soil and water conservation technologies in Eastern Burkina Faso.

Since her PhD, Valentina Mazzucato has won 5 international grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), NORFACE, the European Research Council as lead scientist. Her grants have allowed her to build on transnational migration scholarship to develop an original approach for studying the linkages that are forged by migrants between their origin areas and where they move to or pass through. The simultaneous matched sample methodology she and her teams developed entail studying origin and destination locations at the same time, which allows a more fine-grained understanding of how migrants maintain the ties to their home countries and with what effects for those who stay behind.

Mazzucato joined the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in 2008 where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on theories of globalisation and development; transnational migration; and supervises Bachelor papers and Master theses related to those topics. She is also the leader of the research program on Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development. She is currently heading a university wide, inter-faculty initiative to start a new Bachelor program on Global Studies.

She has served on the 15-member international expert committee on migration and development research of the Social Science Research Council of the US. She also served on the World Connectors' Migration and Development group charged with brining issues related to migration to a broader public. She regularly gives keynote speeches in academic and policy-oriented events.

Before coming to Maastricht, Prof. Mazzucato lived and worked in and on Africa for over twenty years, focusing on West Africa (Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana). She has taught at a public secondary school in Merti, Kenya for a year.

You can view Prof. Mazzucato's inaugural lecture, held on 11 June 2010 at Maastricht University, entitled "Bridging boundaries: Transnationalism and migrants' lives in a globalizing world", on the You Tube channel of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

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