Books

(Co-authored with Greg Pierotti)
Playing with the relation between truth and representation in the stories we tell as ethnographers and theater makers, this book contributes to the current debates around experimental research methodologies and ethnographically grounded theatrical forms. It departs from other studies by proposing a unique and accessible methodology that brings together theatrical devising practices and anthropology.

Through its theoretical exploration and performative script, the book bridges the relation between ethnographic writing and performativity, and simultaneously troubles conventional narrative practices in theater and anthropology. The practice described in the book, Affect Theater, also emphasizes embodied and affective approaches to empirical research and defines a process for rendering this type of material into imaginative academic writing, collaborative performance, and other inventive forms, applicable across a range of academic disciplines.

To read an excerpt, click here.

“This book presents a radical empiricism of theatrical composition on stage and in forms of living. Side stepping explanatory rhetorics, it catches itself in the elemental resonance of a play of light, sound, props, bodies, words, gestures. A fictionalizing real that incites experimentation in an associative swing through the allusive, fragmented, and accented.” — Kathleen Stewart, Professor Emerita, University of Texas

Addressing the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion/exclusion of foreign others; and through the lens of research on the human microbiome and migrant health in Europe.

(University of California Press, 2014)

• Winner (2017): Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Society for Psychological Anthropology

• Winner (2016): Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing, Society of Humanistic Anthropology (2nd Prize)

• Finalist (2015): PEN Center USA UC Press First Book Award

“This book is an original and important contribution to our understanding of the politics of humanitarianism, citizenship, and cultural difference in contemporary Italy.” — Susan J. Terrio, Migration Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 3, November 2016.

A collection of nursery rhymes, popular songs, tongue twisters, lullabies, and poems collected from the Italian oral tradition.

Illustrated by Nazanin Zandi.

(Piemme, 1999)

Vegetarian recipes from the Italian tradition, drawn from family collections and revisited to make vegetarian cooking accessible, varied, and fun.

(Piemme, 1997)