Valentina Napolitano

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology, a Connaught Scholar and a former Director of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto. She works on Critical Catholic Studies as well as on anthropology of affects, borderlands and migration and has a particular interest in psychoanalysis, affective histories, anthropology of traces and the work of Michel de Certeau. She is the author of two ethnographic monographs: “Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church” (FUP, 2016, Finalist Geertz Prize of the Society for Anthropology of Religion) and “Migration, Mujercitas and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico” (UCP, 2002). She is also the co-editor (with K. Norget and M. Mayblin) of “The Anthropology of Catholicism: a Reader” (UCP, 2017), and she has authored articles and special issues also in JRAI, Material Religion, Social Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Religion and Society. Together with Simon Coleman she is the recipient of a 2018-2020 Connaught Global Challenge Award for a project on “Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil” and is currently working on a new ethnographic project at the Detroit/Windsor corridor on the Catholic Church as a living infrastructure.