Valentina Napolitano

Biography

Valentina Napolitano holds a BSc from the London School of Economics, a PhD from SOAS and since 2005 has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Previously she worked at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge and was a permanent Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She is also a faculty member of the Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto.

Research Interests

She has conducted research on urbanities in transformation and prisms of belonging in urban Mexico, on transculturation of complementary medicine always in Mexico and on embodied affects of transnational migrancy in California. Recently she has become interested on ethnographic theories and the work of Michel de Certeau.

Current Projects

Valentina is currently working on research among Mexican and Latino migrants in Rome entitled El Cristo Rey and Il Cristo Risorto: Catholicism, Migration and Latinos in Rome, funded by a grant from the Connaught Foundation. Her research focus is on affect and history, Latino transnational subjectivity and catholic orthodoxy in Rome.

She is working on a book manuscript entitled Postcolonial Rome: Transnational Catholicism and the Latin American Missions related to her current research.

Publications

Migration, Mujercitas and Medicine Men: living in urban Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

(edited with & X. Leyva Solano) Encuentros Antropologicos: power, identity and mobility in Mexican Society. London: ILAS Series. 1998

Recent articles (click to download the PDF files):

• 2007 Hasta verte, Jesús mio: transnacionalismo Mexicano en Roma. Migración y Desarollo 8, 89-107.
• 2007 Michel de Certeau: Ethnography and the Challenge of Plurality. Social Anthropology 15, 1:1-12 (co-authored with David Pratten and Special Issue on Michel de Certeau)
• 2007 Of migrant revelations and anthropological awakenings. Social Anthropology 15, 1:75-93
• 2006 Medical profiling, justice and recognition: renewals for hope in enduring struggles. Latin American Research Review, 41, 1: 234-240
• 2005 Social Suffering and Embodied States of Male Transnational Migrancy in San Francisco, California. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 12, 3: 335-362.
• 2003 Complementary medicine: cosmopolitan and popular knowledge, and transcultural translations- cases from Urban Mexico. Theory, Culture &; Society, 20,4:79-96 (co-researched with G.M. Flores)

Teaching

ANTH 340: Anthropology of Latin America
ANTH 465: Anthropology of Subjectivity
ANTH 356: Anthropology of Religion
ANTH 444: Field Methods in Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology
ANTH 6026: Anthropology of Identity and Subject Formation

Valentina is interested to supervise students wanting to work on:

• Subjectivity and affect, especially in transnational migration
• Transnational Catholicism
• New ontologies of the sacred
• Urbanities in transformation in Latin America