Valentina Napolitano
Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto
Canada
Biography
Valentina Napolitano is the author of ‘Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return’ (Fordham University Press, 2015) and ‘Migration, Mujercitas and Medicine Man: living in Urban Mexico’ (University of California Press, 2002). In the former she examines contemporary migration in the context of a Roman Catholic Church eager to both comprehend and act upon the movements of peoples. Combining extensive fieldwork with lay and religious Latin American migrants in Rome and analysis of the Catholic Church’s historical desires and anxieties around conversion since the period of colonization, Napolitano sketches the dynamics of a return to a faith’s putative centre. Against a Eurocentric notion of Catholic identity, Napolitano shows how the Americas reorient Europe. For more on the book see: http://migranthearts.com Napolitano’s expertise focuses on Catholicism, Affects, Migration, Gendered subjectivities, Transnational Returns of Histories and Roman Catholic Church’s Politics, as well as Political Theology and Catholicism. Her new research is on Catholic Borderlands at the Detroit/Winsdor corridor focusing on catholic living infrastructures in this border region. Napolitano has a long lasting interest in the relation between psychoanalysis and socio-cultural anthropology with a particular focus on the work by Michel de Certeau and the importance of the Medieval Archive for Anthropology. Moreover she is currently working on a new book on Pope Francis as the apex of the Atlantic Return.
Research Interest
Critical Catholic Studies, Transnational Migration, Gender and Affects, Religious Infrastructures, Affective Histories, Anthropology of Traces.
