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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Paolo Heywood

Associate Professor

Affiliations
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Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology

Biography

I studied social anthropology at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where I received my MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees (2010, 2011, 2015). After my PhD I was a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (2014-2016), and then appointed to a Junior Research Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge, and as an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (2016-2020). I came to Durham as an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology in 2020.

Research Groups:

Social Anthropology

Research Summary

My research is broadly focussed on the ways in people seek to live well in the lives in which they find themselves, and how they work to shape themselves to fit the ideals and constraints they live by and with. In particular, I am interested in how ethical and moral ideals inform political projects and practices.

My first book (After Difference, 2018) examined queer activism in Italy, and the ways in which pursuing the virtue of 'difference' animates much of such activism. It describes both the work involved in cultivating 'difference' as a value, and the resulting complications and tensions in relation to broader Italian society and within the activist movement itself.

My second book (Burying Mussolini, 2024) is an ethnography of Predappio the village in northern Italy in which Mussolini was born and is buried, and which for that reason is Italy’s premier site of neo-fascist tourism. My interest here is in how the inhabitants of this village learn to live in the shadow of this difficult heritage by self-consciously pursuing the value of 'ordinariness'. But this is no ordinary 'ordinariness': it is a concrete value that requires work and cultivation to realise. People in Predappio, knowing just how extraordinary they and their home appear to the wider world, put a great deal of conscious effort into appearing instead to be as ordinary as possible. This book examines how this pursuit of the ordinary as an antidote to the ghost of Mussolini permeates a range of dimensions of social life, from ritual through to kinship and local politics.

In addition to these empirical interests, I also have a sustained interest in social theory. I am the author of several contributions to debates on the 'ontological turn' in the social sciences, and have edited books and special issues on explanation, the anthropology of Italy, freedom of speech, and thought experiments in ethics.

My third monograph, currently in preparation, explores the parallels and intersections between social anthropology and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Research interests

  • Activism
  • Anthropological Theory
  • Ethics and Morality
  • Fascism
  • Heritage
  • History and Memory
  • Italy
  • The Ontological Turn

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

  • Fascism, Real or Stuffed: Ordinary Scepticism at Mussolini’s Grave
    Heywood, P. (2024). Fascism, Real or Stuffed: Ordinary Scepticism at Mussolini’s Grave. In M. Candea, T. Fedirko, P. Heywood, & F. Wright (Eds.), Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power (pp. 131-147). University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487552978-008
  • Introduction: Anthropologies of Free Speech
    Candea, M., Fedirko, T., Heywood, P., & Wright, F. (2024). Introduction: Anthropologies of Free Speech. In M. Candea, T. Fedirko, P. Heywood, & F. Wright (Eds.), Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power (pp. 1-32). University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487552978-002
  • Introduction: Back to the Future
    Heywood, P. (2024). Introduction: Back to the Future. In New Anthropologies of Italy Politics, History and Culture. Berghahn Books.
  • Making Fascism History in the Land of the Duce
    Heywood, P. (2024). Making Fascism History in the Land of the Duce. In New Anthropologies of Italy Politics, History and Culture. Berghahn Books.
  • The two faces of Michel Foucault
    Heywood, P. (2023). The two faces of Michel Foucault. In J. Laidlaw (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics (pp. 130-154). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.005
  • Introduction: Ethnographies of Explanation and the Explanation of Ethnography
    Candea, M., & Heywood, P. (2023). Introduction: Ethnographies of Explanation and the Explanation of Ethnography. In P. Heywood & M. Candea (Eds.), Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation (pp. 1-22). Cornell University Press.
  • Are there anthropological problems?
    Heywood, P. (2023). Are there anthropological problems?. In P. Heywood & M. Candea (Eds.), Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation (pp. 25-44). Cornell University Press.
  • The ontological turn: school or style?
    Heywood, P. (2018). The ontological turn: school or style?. In Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315388267-15
  • Moral Psychology: An Anthropological Perspective
    Heywood, P. (2017). Moral Psychology: An Anthropological Perspective. In Moral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61849-4_4

Edited book

Journal Article

Newspaper/Magazine Article

Other (Print)