Marco Gardini is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Pavia and Scientific Director of the Ethnological Mission in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean (MEMOI). He has conducted research in Togo, Madagascar, and Italy, focusing on land conflicts, the legacy of slavery, domestic work, and aging. His research has appeared in journals such as American Ethnologist, Africa, Social Antropology, Ethnos and he is the author of La Terra Contesa. Conflitti fondiari e lavoro agricolo in Togo (Edizioni Mimesis, 2017) and Anzianità e Invecchiamento in Africa e nella Diaspora. Prospettive Antropologiche (Carocci Editore, 2023). Within MEMOI, his work focuses on the legacy of slavery in Madagascar, analyzing in particular the forms of reproduction of stigma and marginalization in the island’s highlands since the 19th century, the link between past slavery and new forms of labor exploitation, and the regimes of mobility, both internal and external to the island, that have characterized local processes of social hierarchization over the long term.
Massimo Zaccaria is a Full Professor of African History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Pavia.He has conducted research in Italy, Great Britain, Norway, Sudan, and Eritrea. He has extensive field experience in the Horn of Africa and regularly conducts research in Eritrea and Ethiopia. He specialises in the social and cultural history of East Africa, with a particular focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. His main research interests include the social and economic history of Eritrea, Italian colonialism, military history, and sources for African history, with a particular focus on photography. He is currently working on research into the history of printing, writing, and reading in the Horn of Africa. His research has appeared in journals such as Aethiopica, Contemporanea, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, International Labour and Working-Class History, First World War Studies, and The Journal of North African Studies. He is the author of Anch’io per la tua bandiera. Il 5° battaglione ascari in missione sul fronte libico (Ravenna, Giorgio Pozzi, 2012), and Missions Abyssines. L’Etiopia, la Grande Guerra e la Conferenza della Pace (Roma, Viella, 2024).
Emanuela Mangiarotti is a Lecturer in the Contemporary History of India and Southeast Asia at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia. She holds dual Ph.D.s in International Conflict Analysis (University of Kent) and Social Sciences (University of Genoa). Her research and publications explore the intersections of gender, religion, and political violence in South and Southeast Asia, with a particular attention to feminist perspectives on conflicts and the history of minority politics. Her more recent academic interests include the relationship between social belonging and human mobilities in the colonial and postcolonial history of South and Southeast Asia, as well as the role of education in shaping social hierarchies, identity formation, and colonial modernities. Emanuela has also written extensively on gender issues in the practice of modern yoga. Mangiarotti has held visiting positions in India and Malaysia and is active in international research projects involving collaboration with academic and institutional partners in India, Malaysia, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia. She has authored several academic publications including the book Feminist Peace and the Violence of Communalism: Community, Gender and Caste in India (Routledge, 2024)
Silvia Neposteri
Silvia Neposteri is a researcher in cultural and historical anthropology, with a particular interest in manuscript cultures and Islamic literatures in Africa, and with a specialisation in the Arab-Malagasy sorabe tradition. After earning her PhD at the University of Pavia in co-tutorship with INALCO (Paris), with a dissertation entitled “Memory and Power in Madagascar: Traces of History in the Arab-Malagasy Tradition”, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Naples L’Orientale for the PRIN project “Islamic Literatures in Sub-Saharan Africa. Themes, Genres and Publics”. Since 2009, she has conducted several field research projects in Madagascar, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. Within the Fontes Historiae Africanae project promoted by the Union Académique Internationale (UAI), she is part of the French FHA Committee in collaboration with the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer (Paris) since 2023. For Italia Solidale – Mondo Solidale ETS, she serves as Missions Coordinator on the Board of Directors, overseeing 155 missions in Italy, Africa, South America, and India. Among her recent works, in 2023 she published the monograph Voici l’histoire de nos ancêtres Anakara (Paris, ASOM-Geuthner), which includes the translation and commentary of the previously unpublished Arabico-Malagasy manuscript HB 6.
Paola Schierano
Paola Schierano is Post-doc Fellow at the University of Milan within the projet “Lo sguardo del RITorno. Esperienze di MIgrazione e di fallimento di giovani italiani e tunisini a confronto (RITMI)”. She has been Visiting Student at the University of La Réunion (EA 7387 D.I.R.E. – Déplacements, Identités, Regards, Ecritures) and Visiting Researcher at the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (LAP) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS/CNRS) in Paris. She has conducted ethnography in the islands of La Réunion and Mayotte (French Departments in the South-West Indian Ocean) studying the short-term impact of Mayotte’s departmentalization on regional mobility dynamics as well as on collective representations. In 2022, she has been awarded a Research Mobility Grant (Atlas Program – 3 months) by Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) and Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Onlus (Torino), in order to conduct an ethnographic fieldwork on Mahorais community in the Ile-de-France Region. Her main research interests focus on mobility, aging, multiple belonging and postcolonial assimilation in the European Overseas.