Rate My Professor Cristina Moreno Almeida

Dr. Cristina Moreno Almeida is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures & Arabic Cultural Studies and an IHSS Fellow in the School of the Arts, Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research explores the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and power in cultural production and digital cultures, focusing on youth culture, rap music, memes, discourses of power and resistance, patriotism, nationalism, and emerging Far-Right ideologies in North Africa and the Middle East. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC-Starting Grant (ERC selected, UKRI funded) project ‘Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus’ (2023-2028), which examines how the historical legacy of Al-Andalus is reshaped and weaponized in digital media by radical groups, including far-right and Islamist networks, through memes, online debates, and propaganda. Moreno Almeida co-directs the Digital Lives Programme at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) and edits the Global Digital Futures book series with Rafal Zaborowski. Her career includes a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities, where she studied Moroccan digital cultures, and roles at the LSE Middle East Centre and Department of Media and Communications, contributing to the ‘Personalised Media and Participatory Culture’ project (2015-2017) with the American University of Sharjah, analyzing youth participatory culture across Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the UAE. She has facilitated international collaborations such as the Fábrica de Rimas/Fabrique des Rimes project (2012-2015) linking Colombian and Moroccan rappers and organized workshops like (Beat)Making the North African Cool! for the Being Human Festival in 2019.

Moreno Almeida’s key publications include the monograph *Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque* (Oxford University Press, 2024), analyzing informal politics and monstrous aesthetics in digital media, and *Rap Beyond ‘Resistance’: Staging Power in Contemporary Morocco* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), on hip hop in the Arabic-speaking world. Selected articles are “Memes and the Moroccan Far-Right” with Paolo Gerbaudo (The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2021), “Memes as Snapshots of Political Participation: The Role of Digital Amateur Activists in Authoritarian Regimes” (New Media & Society, 2020), “Digital Use and Mistrust in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring” with Shakuntala Banaji (Media, Culture & Society, 2019), and “Unraveling Distinct Voices in Moroccan Rap” (Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2013). Her work has influenced discussions on digital radicalization, online ethnography, and cultural resistance, evidenced by collaborations on hip hop and wellbeing research and contributions to handbooks on gender and media in the MENA region.