Chinese Studies

Junior Professor for Modern Taiwan Studies

Academic Career

Research Interests

Elisa Tamburo is an anthropologist, writer, and educator. Her interests intersect urban, political, and environmental anthropology in East Asia (China and Taiwan) and East Africa (Kenya), with specialized expertise in transnational transformation across cities in rapidly urbanizing contexts. As a Marie Curie Global Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, jointly with the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, she is currently leading a research project titled “URBANEG – Negotiating the City: Urban planning and dwelling amidst China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya.”Her current book project explores how Chinese-built infrastructure is transforming urban life in Nairobi, reconfiguring practices of urban citizenship, modes of governance, and expressions of sovereignty across multiple interconnected scales.

Her first book, Exiled in the City: Belonging, Loss, and the Politics of Relocation in a Taipei Military Village, examines what happens when a political ideal fails. It centers on the Kuomintang’s (KMT) failed China reunification project through the experiences of veterans in Taiwan’s military dependents’ villages — temporary settlements built in 1949 for KMT military personnel and their families. As the last living witnesses of the KMT’s project of retaking mainland China, these veterans embody the fading legacy of a collapsed nationalist vision, in which their resettlement in permanent homes in their senior years epitomizes the failed patronage between the state and its most loyal support group. Her book manuscript has been reviewed by Cornell University Press.

 She obtained her Ph.D. in sociocultural Anthropology at SOAS, University of London (2019). 

Publications

  • Tamburo, E. (2023) Relocating the Future: biographical objects, aspiration, and repair in urban Taipei. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29(1): 24-47.
  • Tamburo, E. (2020) High-rise social failures: regulating technologies, authority, and aesthetics in the resettlement of military villages in Taipei. Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2020(86): 36-52.
  • Tamburo, E. (2018) Authoritarianism in the living room: everyday disciplines, senses and morality in Taiwan's military villages. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 47(2): 137-63.

Book manuscripts

Exiled in the City: Belonging, Loss, and the Politics of relocation in a Taipei Military Village. (Reviewed by Cornell University Press)

Invited Talks

  • 2025. ‘Contested Sovereignty: Chinese-led urban development and the Kenyan middle-class in Nairobi.’ Center for African Studies, Leiden University, February 20th.
  • 2025. ‘Negotiating the City: builders, planners, residents and the making of Nairobi.’ African Studies Seminar, University of Amsterdam, February 13th.
  • 2024. ‘Negotiating the City: builders, planners, residents and the making of Nairobi.” Departmental Seminar. Department of Anthropology, University of Bayreuth, November 5.
  • 2019. ‘Moving House: place, identity and the politics of military villages relocation in urban Taiwan.’ Department of Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, July 3rd.
  • 2018. ‘Moving Home: space, identity and the politics of relocation in Taiwan’s military villages.’ Talk series ‘Novissima Sinica’, China Center, University of Tübingen, July 18th.
  • 2018. ‘Rescaling futures: planning, horizons and the politics of urban relocation in Taiwan.’Paper presented as an invited speaker at the conference ‘Culture and Political Change in Contemporary Taiwan.’ Canberra, Australian National University, May 20th.
  • 2017. ‘Moving House: Facing Urban Relocation as a Displaced Community.’ Center of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London. December 5th.

Campus and Departmental Talks

  • 2025. ‘Economic Conjunctures: Planners, Residents, and Chinese-led Urban Development in Nairobi.’ Asia Center, Harvard University, April 22nd.
  • 2025. ‘Negotiating the City: builders, planners, residents and the making of Nairobi.’ Urban Conversations Talk Series, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University. March 11th.
  • 2019. ‘Whose heritage and for whom? Heritagization by dispossession in Taiwan’s military dependents’ villages.’ Department of Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of London. December 11th.