Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow
Areas of Specialization: Sahara-Sahel; Mali, Niger, Algeria; Tuareg, Berabish, Châanba and diaspora in Europe; Creativity; Verbal Art; Student Migrations; Mixed marriages; Religious conversions; Humanitarian Aid.
Amalia Dragani, an Italian anthropologist, is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Florida and KU Leuven. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where she is an associate member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie sociale (Collège de France), and a member of the board of the Société des Africanistes (Musée du Quai Branly).
After a PhD thesis on Tuareg poets’ creative processes in Niger, Mali and Algeria, funded by the Musée du Quai Branly and the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Research Program (PRIN) in Italy and postdoctoral fellowships from the Laboratoire d’Excellence-Création, Arts et Patrimoine at Sorbonne-Paris 1 and the Fonds Croix rouge française at the Institut de Mondes africains at the EHESS. Most recently, she was awarded a fellowship from the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. She has co-taught the anthropology of the Western African Muslim Sahel at the EHESS in Paris.
Her research interests are centered on the Sahara and the Sahel and include: poetic creativity, intangible heritage, and oneiric inspiration; intellectual, artistic and political élites; gender and religiously-mixed marriages; and Muslim-to-Christian conversion. From a historical perspective, she has studied Saharan student mobilities (Tuareg, Berabish) particularly in the Soviet Union and Cuba. She has published about the history of anthropology, especially about such poet-anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski and the connections between literature, poetry, and anthropology. She has published two books about Tuareg poetry in Italian, Giavellotti tifinagh. Poesia e poeti tuareg del Sahara (2005) and Interno tuareg. Etnografia partecipativa della poesia dei nomadi del Niger (2012), and special issues of journals about poetic inspiration (2017) and poetry and anthropology (2018). She has also made a short ethnographic film, Le lendemain du marriage (2020).
Amalia Dragani’s work can be accessed here:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1174-8589
https://florida.academia.edu/AmaliaDragani
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amalia_Dragani