Pierpaolo De Giosa was born and raised in the coastal city of Bari, southern Italy. His soul belongs to the sea.

Pierpaolo is a sociocultural anthropologist and hard-working ethnographer with broad fieldwork experience in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste. His research interests include urban and political anthropology, critical heritage studies, space and place-making practices, and Southeast Asian studies.

Pierpaolo received a BA in International and Diplomatic Relations from the University of Napoli L’Orientale (Italy) in 2008 and a Research MA in Asian Studies from Leiden University (The Netherlands) in 2011. He obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology from Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) in 2016 while working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology as member of the research group “The Global Political Economy of Cultural Heritage”. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Malaysian historical city par excellence, his PhD project explored the politics of heritage of Melaka.

His first book “World Heritage and Urban Politics in Melaka, Malaysia: A Cityscape Below the Winds” was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2021.

Currently, Pierpaolo is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian Studies of Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic). For the MaReLand project he explores land reclamation processes in Malaysia, the workings of sea-related environmentalism and activism, and the politics of urban planning and compensation along the littoral.

You can get in touch with him via pierpa.degios@zoho.com or pierpaolo.degiosa@upol.cz.