Dr Elisa Tamburo

Elisa is a social anthropologist and currently 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. Her research interests intersect urban, political, and environmental anthropology in East Asia (China and Taiwan) and East Africa (Kenya), with specialized expertise in the transnational transformation across cities in rapidly urbanizing contexts.

Her first book, titled Exiled in the City: Belonging, Loss, and the Politics or Relocation in a Taipei Military Village, examines the aftermath of a failed political ideal. It centers on the Kuomintang’s (KMT) failed China reunification project through the experiences of veterans in Taiwan’s military dependents’ villages — temporary settlements built in 1949 for KMT military personnel and their families. As the last living witnesses of the KMT’s project of retaking mainland China, these veterans embody the fading legacy of a collapsed nationalist vision, in which their resettlement in permanent homes in their senior years epitomizes the failed patronage between the state and its most loyal support group. Her book manuscript has been reviewed by Cornell University Press. Elisa completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London (2019).

Her current research project, URBANEG – “Negotiating the City: Urban planning and dwelling amidst China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya”, investigates how Chinese-funded and constructed infrastructure is transforming urban life in Nairobi

In the academic year 2023-2024, she served as a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the Anthropology of China and urban anthropology. Previously, she taught specialized and core courses in anthropology at Oxford, SOAS, University of London, UCL, and the University of Tübingen.

• Tamburo, E. (2023) Relocating the future: biographical objects, aspiration, and repair in urban Taipei. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29 (1): 24-47
• Tamburo, E. (2020) High-rise social failures: regulating technologies, authority, and aesthetics in the resettlement of military villages in Taipei. Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 86: 36-52.
• Tamburo, E. (2018) Authoritarianism in the living room: everyday disciplines, senses and morality in Taiwan’s military villages. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 47(2): 137-63.