Amalia Dragani

Amalia Dragani is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (CNRS-EHESS) with a secondment at the University of Johannesburg (2024-2026). Previously (2020-2023), she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow in a joint program: at the Center for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Florida  (USA), at the KU Leuven (Belgium) and during her one-year fieldwork at the LASDEL (Niger).
She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. 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 two French postdoctoral awards from the Laboratoire d’Excellence-Création, Arts and Patrimoine at Sorbonne-Paris 1 and the Fonds Croix rouge française at the EHESS. Most recently, she was awarded a German fellowship from the "Africa Multiple" Cluster of Excellence at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. At the EHESS she has co-taught the anthropology of the Western African Muslim Sahel (from 2016 to 2020), she has taught Anthropology & Literature (2022-2024) et she teaches Anthropology and Literatures of Student Mobilities (2024-2025).
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 mixed marriages and currently 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), as well as special issues about poetic inspiration (2017) and poetry and anthropology (2018). She has made three short films "Le lendemain du mariage" (2020), "Bulle d'écrivaine" and "Berceuse pour Hassan" (2021). She is member of the board of the Association for Anthropology of Social Change and Development (APAD) and Society of Africanists (SdA) and film programmer at the Cinéma des Africanistes (Musée du Quai Branly). She has been peer reviewer for the following reviews: Cahiers d'Études Africaines, Anthropology & Humanism, Anthropovision, Ateliers d'Anthropologie, Africa (Cambridge), Civilisations, African Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Arabic Studies, Sources, L'Ouest Saharien, Polythesis. Filologia, Interpretazione e Teoria della letteratura and she is a member of the reading pool of Anthropology and Humanism.
Address: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1174-8589