Dr Lidia Sciama

Research Affiliate

lidia.sciama@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Former Director of IGS. Senior Associate of Queen Elizabeth House and Research Associate of ISCA, Oxford University. Taught Social Anthropology and Comparative Literature in England, Italy and USA and conducted longterm fieldwork in the island of Burano.

Research Interests

Women's labour and agency. Gendered crafts: bead making and lace making. Social housing. Memories and narratives of poverty. Relations between anthropology and literature.

Current Research

With Shirley Ardener and Elisabeth Hsu, co-convenor of a seminar series on Identity and Ethnicity, ISCA. Research on Ruskin in Venice, 1835-1888. Stage performance and social reality in Carlo Goldoni's Baruffe Chioggiotte (Quarrels in Chioggia).

Lidia is currently working towards a paper on 'Humour, Irony and Identity among Inhabitants of Venice's Peripheral Islands'.

Publications include:

Articles on 'academic wives' and 'ethnicity and gender', especially with a focus on contemporary and nineteenth-century Italy. Books: A Venetian Island: Environment, History and Change in Burano (Berghahn 2003). Beads and Beadmakers edited with Joanne Eicher (Berg 1998).

'The Venice Regatta: from Ritual to Sport' in Jeremy MacClancy, ed. 1996, Sport, Identity and Ethnicity. Oxford: Berg.

'1943: The Flight from Home', in Esther Herzog, ed. 2008, Life, Death and Sacrifice. Women and Family in the Holocaust. Jerusalem.