Board

Stefan Festini Cucco is an anthropologist and creative artist. He studied political science, international relations and diplomacy at the universities of Siena, Trieste and Lisbon (BA), social- and cultural anthropology (MA) at the universities of Leipzig and Rio de Janeiro. He holds PhD in anthropology, human and social sciences from the universities of Cologne and Salento.  Editorial member of DADA - Rivista di antropologia post-globale. Fieldwork in Ethiopia on the liturgy of the zar cult (2010), on trance and aesthetics in Afro-Brazilian cults in Rio de Janeiro (2011/12), on bodily and emotional-spiritual perception and the experiences of the culturally "other" in the Everest region in Nepal (2014) and on social change between mountain and sea among the Berbers of the central Rif in northern Morocco (2016/17). Research assignments at the University of Bolzano (2019/20) and currently collaborator at the Institute of Biomedicine at Eurac in Bolzano.

Alvise Mattozzi is a sociologist and semiotician, researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bolzano and at the Polytechnic University of Turin. His research focuses on Science and Technology Studies, Design Studies, Sociology and Semiotics. His latest publications are: "Cycles of Dispositions-Unfoldings. A Retro-ANT View of Practices" (Sociologica, 2019) and "What can ANT still learn from semiotics?" (Routledge, 2019).

Daniela Salvucci is a sociocultural anthropologist and junior researcher at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (unibz). Her current research deals with cultures of mountain people in comparative perspective and with the story of the Malinowski family in South Tyrol. She collaborates with the Platform Cultural Heritage Cultural production (unibz) and the MFEA-The Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology (unibz). She has carried out ethnographic fieldworks in Italy and Argentina and done research at the IAI-Ibero Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin, and at the CEMLA-Centro Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, Buenos Aires. Her thematic fields are kinship and family studies, rituals and indigenous territories in the Andean region, history of anthropology and practices of heritage-making.

Together with Matthias Jud, Emanuel Valentin had the idea to found an anthropological association in South Tyrol. In 2011, together with Matthias Jud and five other founding members, he founded evaa, of which he was president from 2011-2018. Magister artium in ethnology, social and cultural anthropology and science of religions at the University of Tübingen. PhD at the Free University of Bolzano. Field research: 4-month study trip to India with ethnomusicological documentation of a Santal festival in Bihar, master thesis on social and ritual change among Sicilian migrants in Germany and PhD research on cultural heritage in the Ladin Dolomite valleys. From 2016 to 2021 he worked at the Directorate for Ladin Education and Culture and from 2022 at the ESF Office of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano.

Tobias Boos, since 2018 member of evaa, is cultural geographer and since 2021 junior researcher at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. After studying geography at Mainz University, he gained his PhD working on the Arab Diaspora in Argentina. The corresponding book "Ethnische Sphären. Über die emotionale Konstruktion von Gemeinschaft bei syrisch- und libanesischstämmigen Argentiniern" was published by Transcript Verlag. Tobias has conducted field research in Argentina, Ecuador and Italy and his research interests include diaspora studies, urban festivals, Internet geography, critical cartography and ethnography. His latest book "Inhabiting Cyberspace and Emerging Cyberplaces. The Case of Siena, Italy" was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Anna Fedele is an anthropologist and sociologist from Bolzano whose research focuses on the intersections of gender, religion and corporeality. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Lisbon University Institute in Portugal. Her monograph “Looking for Mary Magdalene” (Oxford University Press, 2013) has received the Award for Excellence of the American Academy of Religion. More recently her research has focused on pilgrimages in the Alps. She is the co-editor of the Routledge book series Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences and has co-edited the volumes Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (Routledge, 2020), Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality (Routledge, 2013) and Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices (Berghahn, 2011).

Vera Hochkofler is an anthropologist who completed her BSc in Anthropology at the University of East London, and her Masters in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Fieldwork as part of her degree has taken her to Gibraltar, Morocco and Andalusia; with a research focus on the visual representation of the geographical-symbolic significance of the Straits of Gibraltar. 

As part of a research project at the Universitat nacional autonoma de Mexico on religion and carnival rites in Veracruz, Vera did the visual documentation. In recent years she has worked in the field of education and cultural mediation. She currently works part-time as an English teacher at the Vocational School for Crafts and Industry in Bolzano. Her research interests are cultural heritage, applied anthropology and audiovisual productions, ethnomedicine, and permaculture.