Valentina Fusari

Valentina Fusari graduated in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Siena (2006), holds a PhD in Geopolitics (University of Pisa, 2011), and attended the Collen Program on Fertility, Education, and the Environment (University of Oxford, 2014). From 2012 to 2014, she was assistant professor at the Adi Keih College of Arts and Social Sciences (Eritrea) and from the academic year 2014–15, she is adjunct professor of Population, Development and Migration at the University of Pavia, where she is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences.

Her research is broadly rooted in demographic anthropology, social history, and colonial demography, and promoted an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of fertility, hidden population, and mixedness in the Horn of Africa, where she carried out her fieldwork (Eritrea and Ethiopia). Current projects concern the social and geographical mobility of the Italo-Eritrean population in postcolonial Eritrea, and the agency of female missionaries in (post)colonial Eritrea.

Her research project at the ASCL investigates the recent drop in fertility rates in Eritrea (1991-2020), with particular attention to changes attributable to proxy determinants, including reproductive health, female education as well as mobility and the socio-political environment, which resulted in demographic behaviours that move away from tradition, altering the population’s structure and dynamics.