Elisa Tamburo

Bio

I am an anthropologist, writer, and passionate explorer of the human. I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. My ethnographic interests lie at the intersection of urban, environmental, political, and economic anthropology in China, Taiwan, and, more recently, East Africa. My anthropological research to date has explored the politics of displacement and its affective and temporal reach in the contexts of fast urbanizing cities in specific historical trajectories. I am currently undertaking a research project exploring the global interconnections between China and Africa through the lens of city building.

I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. During the 2024/2025 academic year, I will be a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. Between 2020-2022 I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ERC-funded project ‘Cosmological Visionaries’ at King’s College London, which focused on Climate and Environmental Change in Southwest China.

My current research project is titled “URBANEG – Negotiating the City: Urban planning and dwelling amidst China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya” and investigates practices of planning and dwelling in Nairobi, Kenya, vis à vis infrastructure funded and built by Chinese actors. I am also in the process of revising my first book manuscript titled Exiled in the City: Belonging, loss, and the politics of urban relocation in a Taipei military village for Cornell University Press. The book examines what happens when a political ideal fails in the contexts of the Chinese Nationalist government after its exile to Taiwan in 1949 by examining the politics of relocation of historical, diasporic settlements, the so called military dependents’ village (juancun) – to high-rise apartment blocks.