Monica Sassatelli is a cultural sociologist with research expertise on on cultural events and institutions, cultural policies and creative industries. Her PhD research involved a case study of the European Capital of Culture programme and its role within EU cultural policies as a means of identity-building. In 2008-10 she has been involved in an collaborative project titled ‘Art Festivals and the European Public Culture’, which examined the role of festivals as sites of trans-national identifications and democratic debate. This inspired her to continue researching art biennials in particular, expanding beyond a focus on Europe to examine the emerging, widespread ‘biennialization’ of the contemporary art world.
Among her publications are the monograph Becoming Europeans. Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 (Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2010) and the edited collection Arts Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London: Routledge, 2011 (co-edited with G. Delanty and L. Giorgi). Recent articles include: ‘“Europe in your Pocket”: narratives of identity in euro iconography” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 25(3): 354-366, 2017; and ‘Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds’. Theory, Culture and Society 34(4) 89–113, 2017.
