Elena ZAPPONI

Elena Zapponi is a researcher in anthropology at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She graduated in Folk Traditions History at Sapienza University of Rome and holds two PhDs: one in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2006), and another in Cultural Anthropology from Sapienza University of Rome (2022).

She has held postdoctoral fellowships in Argentina and Uruguay (EHESS) and research fellowships at the University of Geneva and Sapienza University of Rome. She has been conducting fieldwork in Cuba since 2010.

Her research interests include: gender, economies of desire, racialized sexualities, slavery and aesthetic productions; religious anthropology; the anthropology of environmental conflicts; mobility and migration; and the politics of representation and citizenship. She is currently conducting ethnographic research on women, labor and gender invention in the Venetian Lagoon.

Her publications include: "La calvizie la portarono a Cuba gli spagnoli o della pratica di cittadinanza del cimarronaje", afterword in Miguel Barnet, Cimarrón. Biografia di uno schiavo fuggiasco, edited by Elena Zapponi, foreword by Italo Calvino, Quodlibet, Macerata, 2024; “Partages et transmissions autour de l’entretien des cheveux ‘pasa’ à La Havane”, in special issue of Ethnologie française “Pratiques esthétiques: partages, transmission, socialité”, vol. 53, 2023; Mulier Ludens. Bellezza e immagini della mulatta cubana, Milan, Meltemi, 2022.

Her book Marcher vers Compostelle. Ethnographie d’une pratique pèlerine (Paris, L’Harmattan/AFSR) received the 2011 Annual Prize from the French Association for the Social Sciences of Religion.