Jennifer Allsopp first read Dante’s The Divine Comedy at the advice of her late Italian teacher Andi Oakley in a dark library in Milton Keynes, England, when she was 15 years old. She studied Italian at Oxford University so that she might one day be able to read the text in its original Italian.
Her love for Dante has be balanced in recent years by a love of walking and supporting refugees through research and activism. By embarking on the Cammino di Dante, and blogging daily about her pilgrimage, she hopes to bring together her passion for Dante with her compassion for today’s refugees.
As an academic, Jennifer’s work centres on how people move and mobilize to support what they perceive to be viable futures for themselves, their families and their societies in the context of migration. She is drawn to interdisciplinarity and often incorporates the humanities to inform the content and practice of her research. She is passionate about comparative studies in international migration and the pursuit of innovative methodologies and co-production.
Jennifer moved to the University of Birmingham in 2021 to take up a Birmingham Fellowship following positions at Harvard University, the London International Development Centre and the University of Oxford among others. Prior to pursuing a career in international academia, she worked as a writer and journalist with openDemocracy 50.50 and as a feminist civil society campaigner. This community ethos informs her approach to research.
Her first co-authored book,Policing Humanitarianism: EU Anti-Smuggling Policies and their Impact on Civil Society (Hart, 2019) reports on extensive fieldwork which she conducted in Hungary and Serbia, Italy, Greece, the UK and France between 2015 and 2018 at the height of the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’.
Her second co-authored book, Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing(Bristol University Press, 2020), is the product of a cutting-edge four-year participatory research project, Becoming Adult, which examined the wellbeing trajectories of over 100 unaccompanied young migrants and refugees in Europe.
She is currently working on a monograph, Reading Dante with Refugees which uses literary theory to unlock stagnant debates in political and social science through an exploration of the centrality of narrative as part of a universal search for subjective and civic wellbeing.
She is host of the podcast Immigration & Democracy produced by Harvard University. .
