University of Bergamo, Italy (UNIBG)
Website: www.unibg.it
The Università degli Studi di Bergamo (University of Bergamo, Italy – UNIBG) was founded in 1968. It consists of six faculties – Economics, Educational Studies, Engineering, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Humanities, and Law. The strengths of the University of Bergamo are the wide range of courses offered, the excellent use of the numerous laboratories available to students, the ambitious research centres, and, last but not least, the fact that the University operates in one of the most dynamic of areas, from both a cultural and an economic viewpoint.
Davide Torsello was trained in socio-cultural anthropology at academic institutions of different countries (Italy, Japan, UK, Germany, Hungary), and the variety of their theoretical and methodological perspectives exerted an everlasting influence on his scientific profile. Through over ten years of ethnographic fieldwork research experience mostly in Central Eastern Europe, in Italy and Japan, he developed sensitivity for investigating trust, corruption, informal economy, interpersonal and power relations, performance of government institutions and organizations. His most recent book publication is entitled: The New Environmentalism? Civil Society and Corruption in the Enlarged EU, 2012 Ashgate. He is associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergamo, Italy
Maria Giulia Pezzi is a social anthropologist, who joined Università degli Studi di Bergamo in October 2013 as a researcher for the WP4 ANTICORRP project, carrying on fieldwork research on anti-corruption practices in Lombardy, Italy. She defended her PhD in European Ethnology at KF-Universität in Graz-Austria in 2013 with a Dissertation in Anthropology of Tourism based on fieldwork ethnography in Lanzarote, Spain. She holds a honour MA in Anthropology from Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca-Italy, with a thesis in Anthropology of Kinship and Social Relations, based on research on trust issues among members of Japanese Religious Sect Soka Gakkai in Italy; as well a BA in Media Sciences from Università IULM Milano-Italy, where she defended a thesis in Ethnolinguistics. Her research fields are Economic and Political Anthropology, Anthropology of Tourism, Visual and Media Anthropology, and Religion Studies.
Zaira Lofranco joined the University of Bergamo in 2010 as post doctoral fellow in social and cultural anthropology. Since january 2014 she had been involved as a researcher in the FP7 ANTICORRP project with the specific task of carring out an ethnography of corruption practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 2010 to 2013 she actively participated as an early carrier researcher in the EU funded networking project Eastbordnet, remaking eastern borders in Europe chaired by professor Sarah Green (Helsinki University). She completed her PhD in anthropology and analysis of cultural change at the University of Naples. In her doctoral research titled "Ethnography of a new boundary", she explored how practices of urban and domestic space in post war Sarajevo and Eastern Sarajevo entrenched with geographical and (geo) political transformations.
