Dr. Chiara Pagano is the principal researcher for Subproject 5, within Research Unit 2, carrying out an ethnography in Medenine governorate along the south-eastern Tunisian border with Libya.

Dr. Pagano’s research focuses on the Libyan-Tunisian border zone, specializing in the historical constructions and (re)configurations of geographical, political, and identity-based frontiers in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Her interdisciplinary work straddles the intersection of African Studies, critical borderlands studies, and critical border studies.

Dr. Pagano received her Ph.D. in African History, European, and International Studies from the University of Roma Tre, Rome in 2018, where she completed her dissertation on “Emergence and Evolutions of an Ethnic Discourse in Colonial Tripolitania: The Berber Issue (1911-1923)”. She then joined the University of Pavia’s Department of Political and Social Sciences as a postdoctoral researcher in African History. She also worked as principal researcher for the Italian, Libyan, and Tunisian case studies in the research project "Infrastructure Space and the Future of Migration Management: The EU Hotspots in the Mediterranean Borderscape,” at the University of Basel.

Dr. Pagano has been awarded a number of fellowships, including a visiting fellowship at the American University in Cairo, and a visiting fellowship at Northwestern University (2017). She was an associate researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain in Tunis (2016). 

Dr. Pagano is completing her first monograph on the historical construction and political mobilizations of ethnic and geographic boundaries in early colonial Libya, focusing on the area between the coastal city of Zwāra to the Jebel al-Nafusa on the Libyan-Tunisian political and administrative border.