Annalisa Battista she/her

Annalisa Battista graduated in Criminology from the University of Westminster where she was awarded the History, Sociology, and Criminology Scholarship, the Certificate of Achievement for every year of study, and the Best Performing Student Award at the end of the three-year programme.

She graduated with distinction in the MPhil Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where she started researching on the topic of widespread and systematic sexual violence in former Yugoslavia. This study provided the basis for her work at the University of Edinburgh, where she has been awarded her PhD. Her work elaborates a new theoretical framework – Feminist State Crime Theory – to better understand the widespread and systematic perpetration of sexual violence as a means of genocide by learning from the case of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. She has presented her work at the BSC held in Glasgow (2024) and the ESC held in Florence (2023), Bucharest (2024), and Athens (2025) in September 2025.

Annalisa has co-authored a research article on the role of ethics and emotions in teaching atrocity criminology through the use of archives of mass violence. This work, conducted with Dr Andy Aydin-Aitchison, has been presented at both the BSC and ESC conferences, in the Terribly and Terrifyingly Normal podcast, and has been published by BRILL. She has taught at the University of Edinburgh, Saveetha School of Law, and the University of Westminster. Her research interests are atrocity crimes, state crimes, conflict-related sexual violence, and the relationship between torture and sexual violence.

Recent Publications: 

Aydın-Aitchison, A., & Battista, A. (2026). “Chapter 5 Emotions and Ethics in Teaching Mass Atrocities Using Archives”. In Emotions, Ethics and Mass Atrocities. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Nijhoff. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004754720_007

Keywords: sexual violence; genocide; atrocity