Currently on leave for doctoral research in Italy.
Michael A. Di Giovine is an anthropologist completing his PhD in the University of Chicago’s department of anthropology. In 2007 Michael became Slover Linett’s inaugural Research Fellow, a role in which he has led several ethnographic studies and overseen interview and survey fieldwork for a wide range of museum and education clients.
Michael has written and spoken widely in the United States and Europe on issues related to museums, heritage, and tourism. He is interested in the possibilities that museums and other educational institutions offer for the articulation of identity claims and for urban and cultural revitalization in non-Western areas, especially in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam and Cambodia, Michael has collaborated with galleries, art foundations and historic preservation societies. His current ethnographic research centers on southern Italy, where he is examining relationships among religious tourism, pilgrimage, heritage and place-making, and economic development.
Michael’s articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Curator and Critical Inquiry, and he has lectured on the anthropology of museums and tourist spaces. He is the author of The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism (2009), which has been praised by leading scholars in the field as “an essential book” and “the most thorough and sophisticated examination of the UNESCO heritage system to date.”
Michael is also a Lecturer in the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Studies, where he teaches courses on the landmark texts of Western social science and religion as well as on Southeast Asian religious epics.
Prior to his academic career, Michael worked as a cultural tour operator in Europe and Asia. A dual citizen of Italy and the United States, Michael earned his BS cum laude from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and his MA from the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences.
He is a member of several academic and honor societies in history and the social sciences, including the American Anthropological Association.
