Prof. Dorothy Louise Zinn

MFEA co-founder Dorothy Zinn is Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. She originally hails from the U.S., and after a B.A. in Anthropology and Linguistics (Brown University), she did her graduate training in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin (PhD 1994). Before joining the Faculty of Education at Unibz, she taught at the University of Basilicata from 1999-2011. Prof. Zinn’s research on political economy in Southern Italy has addressed issues of chronic youth unemployment, clientelism, and social change. Her monograph on patronage-clientelism is available in a new English edition as Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy (Berghahn, 2019). Zinn’s other main research focus regards immigration and multiculturalism. Since 1990, she has studied immigration in Italy from the perspective of specific groups (Senegalese, Albanians) and that of the receiving society, as well as intercultural education and the experience of youths from immigrant families. Her volume Migrants as Metaphor (2018) is based on fieldwork on immigration in South Tyrol. Her most recent work deals with conceptions of gender-based violence and empowerment among migrant-origin women. Prof. Zinn is recognized internationally as a scholar of the work of Italian ethnologist Ernesto De Martino, and she has published two annotated translations in English of his monographs (The Land of Remorse [2005] and Magic: A Theory from the South [2015]). Zinn has extensive experience working as a scientific consultant with migrant advocacy groups, and she is an editorialist with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera for Trentino-Alto Adige region.