Dr F. Cerchiaro (Francesco)

I am an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Diversity Department at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at KU Leuven in Belgium.

I hold a PhD in Social Sciences (2013) from the University of Padua, Italy. Before joining Radboud University in January 2023, I worked at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at KU Leuven between 2018 and 2022.

My research primarily focuses on mixedness—the lived experiences, social constructions, and institutional meanings attributed to mixed identities, families, and relationships. I have been awarded multiple competitive international research grants, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2018-2020) from the European Commission and an FWO Senior Fellowship (2020-2022) from the Flanders Research Foundation, to investigate these dynamics in relation to migration, identity formation, and social belonging.

More broadly, my work explores how people make meaning of their lives at the intersection of family, migration, and religion. I have examined how Christian-Muslim families navigate cultural diversity, how masculinity and migrant fatherhood evolve in transnational contexts, and how emotions shape experiences of migration and belonging. A second strand of my research investigates the "romantic turn" and its cultural implications, analyzing how religious symbols and cultural practices are re-signified, from the study of pagan/religious rogations in Italy to the online popularization of off-grid living.

My work is rooted in qualitative methods, particularly life stories and ethnography, and has been published in leading journals in the fields of sociology of religion, migration, gender, and sociological theory.

More about my research and publications at www.francescocerchiaro.com