It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of Fausto Colombo, a key figure in European media studies, for a long time actively involved in ECREA, both as a board member and as a lecturer and organizer of the ECREA Doctoral Summer School.
The news of Fausto Colombo's passing after an intense battle with illness leaves in shock the many students and mentees who had the privilege of having him as a mentor during their formative years and beyond, as well as the numerous friends and colleagues across so many countries with whom he maintained a profound intellectual exchange.
Fausto Colombo graduated in Philosophy in 1978 from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where he pursued his entire academic career and became a full professor in 2003, in the Faculty of Political Science, where he served as the Coordinator of the degree program Communication and Society. He was also Director of the Department of Communication from 2013 to 2024, and until 2012 Director of OssCom - Research Centre on Media and Communication, that he founded in 1994. In 2015, he held the UNESCO Chair in International Communication at Université Stendhal in Grenoble, and was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2016, where he served in the section committee for Film, Media and Visual Studies in its early days, and helped to establish media and communication research as a natural part of European sciences.
With his intellectual contribution and organizational generosity, Fausto Colombo played a pivotal role in the development of media studies, first in Italy and later across Europe. In the Italian context, he was a key figure in the transition from the semiotic-philosophical approaches typical of the Italian school up until the 1990s to approaches increasingly informed by political and sociological sensitivities. At the same time, he actively contributed to breaking the insularity of Italian academia, fostering its engagement with international scholarly debates. This commitment is also reflected in his many years of involvement with ECREA, both at an organizational level and as a lecturer and later local organizer of the ECREA Doctoral Summer School.
His main research interests included the study of cultural industries, popular culture, and the relationship between media and generations. His intellectual curiosity, clarity in perceiving emerging trends, and sharp analytical skills in interpreting them as part of broader processes made his contribution essential to the entire field of media studies. Fausto Colombo never viewed intellectual work as an end in itself, but as part of a broader civic and political commitment—never partisan, yet always keenly aware of both the opportunities and the risks posed by the transformations in media and communication phenomena for our democracies and communities. He taught his students and mentees to avoid both the temptation of abstract, self-referential theorization and the pitfalls of sterile empiricism.
Fausto Colombo's legacy also lies in his vision of intellectual work and academic production as profoundly human and inherently relational endeavours, resisting the fragmenting and individualizing pressures of neoliberal academia: his attentiveness to others as individuals and his dedication to building deep, close relationships with colleagues and collaborators were, for him, the very foundation of collective intellectual production. Active until the very end in dialogue and collaboration with colleagues and students, he leaves an unfillable void but also a precious example of a human and intellectual approach to media studies.
