Dr Diego Maria Malara
- Senior Lecturer (Sociological & Cultural Studies)
Biography
Diego Maria Malara joined the University of Glasgow in 2018 as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Global Religion. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh, an MSc in Medical Anthropology from the same institution, an MA in African Studies from Dalarna University, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Bologna. Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, he held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and a teaching fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. During his doctoral fieldwork research, he was a research affiliate at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at the University of Addis Ababa.
Research interests
Diego Maria Malara’s research interests include:
- Ritual and religion
- Embodiment and personhood
- Ethics and care
- Spirit possession, witchcraft and magic
- Kinship and relatedness
- Religious media and visual anthropology
- Religious pluralism
- Food, commensality and hospitality
- Health and healing
- Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity
During fieldwork conducted in 2011-2013, Diego Maria Malara started flirting with visual ethnography. The first offspring of this ongoing romance was ‘The Devil and the Holy Water’ (2016), a documentary film on new forms of Ethiopian Orthodox exorcism that has won several international awards and has been screened in academic fora as well as film festivals across Europe, Australia and the US.
Supervision
I would like to hear from students interested in any of my areas of interest.
- Habte, Tsion Afework
Exploring gendered mental health issues in a One Health context with a pastoralist community in the Afar region of Ethiopia. - Ulysse, Steveen
Rethinking Haitian Vodou
Teaching
'Anthropology of Religion' - Section of 'Sociology 2B', Undergraduate 2018-2019
'Religion in Society' - Postgraduate 2018-2019
'Cosmology, Ritual and Belief' - Undergraduate (Hons.) 2019-2020
Additional information
I am the Postgraduate Dissertation coordinator