Dr Paola Esposito
Departmental Lecturer
I am a sensory anthropologist whose research engages with visual, multimodal, performance-based, and critical medical anthropology, as well as ontological approaches and collaborations with artists and makers.
My research interests include the lived body and body-mind relations; learning, enskillment and transformation; aesthetic and therapeutic practices; somatic movement and butoh dance; images and imagination; spirit mediumship and divination; globalisation and transnationalism.
Contact
My work lies at the intersection of visual and medical anthropology, examining configurations of the lived body across artistic, therapeutic and medical domains.
My doctoral and postdoctoral research centred on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with practitioners of butoh, a Japanese-transnational dance and somatic movement genre, analysing how its reported formlessness and indeterminacy are negotiated in practice. This research has resulted in multiple peer-reviewed publications, including collaborations with dancers, theatre-makers, musicians, and digital artists (see Publications). My current research engages with notions of bodily knowing, imagining, and transformation, and mobilises graphic, audio-visual and performance methods and approaches, contributing to multimodal anthropology.
Since 2016, I have been based at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA). I began as an Early-Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology (2016–2017), then served as a Departmental Lecturer in Medical Anthropology (2017–2024), and most recently as a Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology (VMMA) (2024–2025). I continue to teach full-time on the MSc/MPhil programme in VMMA, with a particular focus on visual, sensory, and multimodal approaches in anthropology.
I have supervised MSc, MPhil, and undergraduate dissertations, and regularly teach sensory and multimodal research methods to MPhil and doctoral students from a variety of backgrounds, including anthropology, education, geography, primary health care, and social policy.
From 2016 to 2023, I promoted visual medical anthropology as a subfield of medical anthropology through the Green Templeton College Medical Anthropology Film & Discussion Group. Since 2022, I have co-led the Anthropology-Art Collective at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and the arts.