Marzia Balzani
Program Head, Anthropology; Research Professor of Anthropology
NYU Abu Dhabi

Marzia Balzani has conducted fieldwork in India on political ritual among elite Hindu groups (2003 Modern Indian Kingship: Tradition, Legitimacy and Power in Rajasthan) and with Ahmadiyya Muslims living in the diaspora (Ahmadiyya Islam and the Muslim Diaspora: Living at the End of Days, 2020). Her latest book, Social and Cultural Anthropology for the Twenty-first Century: Connected Worlds (2021, co-author N. Besnier) draws on over 30 years of experience teaching social anthropology. Her publications include papers on gender and religious persecution claims in the asylum system in the UK, the dream in Islam, spectacle and ritual, pilgrimage, urban deindustrialization and regeneration, the South Asian diaspora, and the teaching of anthropology. Her current research interests include an archival study analysing British government and Ahmadiyya community strategies in dealing with persecution, and the ethnography of an Italian town which considers strategies for social revitalization, the social uses of memory, popular theatre and the role vernacular auto/biography plays in the production of local identities.