School staff

Dr Stefani Vasil, Lecturer Melbourne Campus

Stefani Vasil is a lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Thomas More Law School. Prior to this, she was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre at Monash University. During her time at the centre, Stefani contributed to a program of research on migration and gendered violence and taught into the Graduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma in Family Violence Prevention. She has also previously taught undergraduate units in the social sciences at RMIT University. Stefani’s primary research centres on the intersections between migration and gendered violence, including domestic and family violence, with a focus on citizenship and immigration regimes and the role of the state. Her PhD thesis (RMIT University) explored the ways that insecure migration status intersected with other social inequalities to shape migrant women’s lived experiences of and responses to domestic and family violence. This work examined precarity in relation to migrant women's lives in Australia and how it can function as a structural condition to heighten women's vulnerability to violence and undermine their efforts to ensure their safety and survival. Stefani recently secured funding from the Victorian Women’s Trust and in 2024 will lead a pilot study examining the interaction between domestic and family violence and women’s deaths by suicide. Stefani has significant experience and expertise in undertaking in-depth qualitative and community-based research that centres lived experience. She is a member of the National Advocacy Group on Women on Temporary Visas Experiencing Family Violence and is committed to contributing to scholarship that adopts an intersectional and transnational approach, and advocates for migrant women’s meaningful inclusion in efforts to address violence at a range of levels. Stefani has a forthcoming book with Professor Marie Segrave entitled The borders of violence: temporary migration and domestic and family violence (Routledge). Her work has also been published in the British Journal of Criminology, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Violence Against Women and the Women’s Studies International Forum.