Dr. Giacomo Orsini is an Associate Fellow at the Brussels School of Governance. With a focus on the most empirical outcomes of European integration, Dr Giacomo Orsini has conducted much fieldwork research along the European external border in Melilla, Malta, Lampedusa and Fuerteventura, and is now working as Senior Research Officer of the Department of Sociology of the University of Essex for the ESRC funded project ‘Bordering on Britishness: an Oral History Study of 20th century Gibraltar’. Since 2015 he also works as Maître de Conference of the Institut d'Etudes Européennes of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches the postgraduate course 'International Migrations in Europe'.
His major research areas are concerned with borders – being them real or symbolic, migration and asylum, contemporary governance systems and governmentality, maritime sociology and the sociology of everyday life. During his academic career, he has collaborated with several European as well as non-European universities, and became member of various international research networks. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious GUF-100 Prize as the Student of the Year of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. Later that year, he also received the University of Essex's studentship to conduct his doctoral research there.