Profile
Michele Gazzola is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Public Policy and Administration at the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at Ulster University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has an interdisciplinary scientific profile specialised in the analysis and evaluation of language policy and the study of the economic and social aspects of multilingualism. His epistemological approach is versatile and bridges different disciplines, ranging from public policy analysis to economics and sociolinguistics. He has published articles in top-tier journals across all three disciplinary fields.
In 2003, Michele Gazzola obtained a degree in Public Administration and International Institutions Management (University “Luigi Bocconi”, Milan) with a dissertation on the relationship between the political and economic costs of multilingualism in the European Union, which was awarded first prize in the International Competition on Multilingualism organised by the Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano and subsequently published by FrancoAngeli. His interest in the economic and political aspects of linguistic diversity led him to pursue an academic career at the University of Geneva under the supervision of François Grin as a research and teaching assistant from 2003 to 2005. After obtaining a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of York in England in 2006, Michele Gazzola returned to the University of Geneva as a member of the "Economics, Languages, and Education Research Group" (ELF) to undertake a PhD in Multilingual Communication Management under the supervision of François Grin and François Vaillancourt as part of the integrated European project “Linguistic Dynamics and Diversity Management” (DYLAN, 2006–2011). During the same period, he acted as an adviser on a project led by the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). His doctoral thesis, defended in 2011, is an interdisciplinary research study on the evaluation of efficiency and fairness of language policies in international organisations active in patent protection, and was published in 2014 by John Benjamins.
In 2011, thanks to a research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation and subsequently a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (European Commission), he began working as a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin on a project concerning linguistic justice in the European Union, under the supervision of Bengt-Arne Wickström. In 2015, he co-founded the Research Group in Economics and Language (REAL) at Humboldt University of Berlin, together with Bengt-Arne Wickström and Torsten Templin, as part of the integrated European research project “Mobility and Inclusion in a Multilingual Europe” (MIME), which concluded in 2018. Over the years, the research topics addressed have broadened and diversified to include the evaluation of language policies for the protection and promotion of minority languages, the importance of languages in the labour market, linguistic integration policies for immigrants, and the linguistic consequences of university internationalisation processes.
Between 2016 and 2018, Michele Gazzola took on new roles in addition to his position as a research fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin: he was adjunct lecturer at the University of Lugano, research fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana, and a consultant for the Swiss Federal Government, the European Parliament, the Provincial Institute for Educational Research and Experimentation in Trento (IPRASE) and the University of Florence. After a brief experience as a postodoctoral researcher at the University of Leipzig under the supervision of Sabine Fiedler, he moved in 2018 to the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, where he is still working.
At the University of Ulster, he holds the post of lecturer in public policy and administration (becoming a senior lecturer in 2025) and he is part of the Centre for Public Administration (CPA). He is involved in both teaching and research. In 2020, he obtained the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice (PgCHEP), a training certificate in university pedagogy that qualifies him to become a Fellow of Advance Higher Education (FHEA) in the UK. Since 2023, he has been Director of the Master of Public Administration programme. In 2024, he became a Senior Fellow of Advance Higher Education (SFHEA). His research has been enriched by new themes and experiences. Thanks to funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Authority for Linguistic Minorities of the Autonomous Province of Trento, and the Regional Agency for the Friulian Language (ARLeF), between 2019 and 2023, Michele Gazzola has the opportunity to undertake research periods as a visiting researcher at the University of Ottawa, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and the University of Udine to study the topic of multilingualism in public administration and the planning and monitoring of language policies for the protection and promotion of minority languages. These two themes are intertwined in his involvement in a project on institutional bilingualism in ethnically mixed areas, led by the Institute of Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana. Furthermore, thanks to research funding from the Esperantic Studies Foundation (ESF) and the British Academy, he has developed indicators to empirically evaluate linguistic justice. During the same period, he acted as a consultant to the European Parliament and the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region.
All these experiences combined have contributed to refining his views on the theory of language policy and planning as an interdisciplinary field of research, and led to the publication in 2024 of the Routledge Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (co-edited with François Grin, Linda Cardinal and Kathleen Heugh). The aim of this book is to re-establish and strengthen the links between research in language policy and planning and the social sciences, in order to rediscover the pragmatic and operational origins of language planning, thereby moving beyond the period dominated by postmodernism and critical theories.
In 2025, he was awarded the Italian National Scientific Qualification (ASN) as an associate professor in the scientific area 14/A2 – Political Science. In 2026, he received the “Distinguished Research Award” from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Ulster University.
He is the author of around one hundred academic publications and has delivered over two hundred presentations at academic and institutional conferences in various countries. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Language Problems & Language Planning, a member of the executive board of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CED) of the World Esperanto Association (UEA), a board member of Research Committee “The Politics of Language” (RC50) of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), and a member of the executive committee of the Language Policy Special Interest Group (LP SIG) of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). From 2019 to 2025, he served on the executive committee of the Study Group on Language Policy (GSPL) of the Italian Linguistic Society (SLI). He is also affiliated with the “Economy, Languages and Education” Research Group at the University of Geneva (ELF), and with the Language Management Interdisciplinary Research Group (GRIGL) at the University of Ottawa. He contributes to public debate through articles and interviews in some major media outlets, including Corriere della Sera, The Guardian, The Economist, Euronews and The Times Higher Education.
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