Alessandro Corso

Anthropologist focusing on life and death across the Central Mediterranean migration routes.

Alessandro holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Durham University in the United Kingdom. Prior to joining CMI, Alessandro has secured a prestigious ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowip as Principal Investigator with a project titled "Migrant Remains" at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, and taught at the MSc in Migration Studies at ODID. Alessandro is also Research Associate at Witwatersrand University.

Based on eight years of research based in Lampedusa island (Sicily), Alessandro obtained a MSCA Global Fellowship at CMI and with the partnership of Columbia University for his project "Fishers of Corpses: An Anthropological Archive of Border Communities and Their Responses to Migrants' Death in the Central Mediterranean through Art and Ethnography". 

Alessandro's work combines political theory, existential anthropology, and art, to explore new possibilities of expression and pathways for critical thinking both in academia and beyond it. He produced a short series of paintings based on first fieldwork in Lampedusa island between 2016 and 2017 for an anthropological project funded by the Royal Institute of Social Anthropology and called "Illustrating Anthropology".

He has written for Italian and International media such as Il Manifesto, and Al Jazeera

In his current project, he is working with a local artists, photographers, video makers, and researchers to produce a puppet show inspired by ethnographic research at sea between Sicily and Tunisia (in collaboration with Giacomo Sferlazzo) and an Anthropological Art Exhibition.