Author, Researcher, Lecturer, Curator, Academic
Dr. Cristina Moreno-Almeida is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Digital Culture and Arabic Cultural Studies at Queen Mary University of London and Fellow at the Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She has worked at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and the Middle East Centre and the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and cultural production. She has published on rap music, memes, the politics of resistance, nationalism, and online far-right cultures. She is the Principal Investigator of the UKRI (ERC nominated) project 'Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus' (2023-2024) which looks at the melding of historical episodes, nostalgia for lost empires, cultural difference, and violent actions on digital media.
Her academic journey includes prior posts at the LSE Middle East Centre and the Department of Media and Communications, where she collaborated on the 'Personalised Media and Participatory Culture' project (2015-2017) with the American University of Sharjah (UAE). This research centred on young people’s participatory culture, creative production, and internet usage in Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the UAE.
She also held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship working at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, London delving into the study of Moroccan digital cultures, investigating the social, cultural, and political implications of disseminating cultural content through digital platforms.
Her first book, Rap Beyond Resistance: Staging Power in Contemporary Morocco (Palgrave, 2017), challenges prevailing narratives surrounding cultural resistance within Hip Hop culture in the Arabic-speaking world. This work delves into the tension between state-sponsored discourses in Morocco and artists' efforts to leverage these discourses to overcome mediatic and economic censorship.
Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque (Oxford University Press, 2024), presents a novel approach to studying informal politics, monstrous aesthetics, and digital media. The book revolves around digital cultures, focusing on memes, politics, and digital aesthetics exploring grotesque aesthetics in memes and other forms of digital cultural production to articulate contemporary issues and politics online.
Additionally, she has actively engaged with young artists through various initiatives, such as the Fábrica de Rimas/Fabrique des Rimes (Rhyme Factory) project, which facilitated collaborations between rappers from Colombia and Morocco (2012-2015). She also contributed to the Pop-Up Studios project with the British Council in Morocco, sharing her expertise in the music field with aspiring young artists. She has also organized the (Beat)Making the North African Cool! workshop, a beat-making event centred on North African music, as part of the Being Human Festival in 2019.
Please see the events pages for latest symposiums and talks.
↓