Melissa Blanchard is a social anthropologist and a Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Centre Norbert Elias, Marseille, where she carries out research on ancestral citizenship acquisition and return migration to the EU from Latin America. She is one of the PIs of the Ancestral Citizenship in Europe project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Since obtaining her PhD, she has first worked on women’s migration and migrant entrepreneurship, and more recently on return migration. She has researchedreturn migration in Senegal, Italy and Chile, increasingly considering it in relation to the ways in which people use their ancestral citizenship.