Staff profile

Paolo Heywood studied social anthropology at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he received his MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees (2010, 2011, 2015). After receiving his PhD he was employed as 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 a Research Associateship in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (2016-2020). He came to Durham as an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology in 2020. As of 2021 he is also the Honorary Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

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, currently in preparation, 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 will examine 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 the status of anthropological theory. I am the author of several contributions to debates on the 'ontological turn' in the social sciences, and am presently editing a volume on the status of 'explanation' as an anthropological practice. 

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

Authored book

• Heywood, Paolo (2018). After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory. Berghahn.

Chapter in book

• Heywood, Paolo (2023). The two faces of Michel Foucault. In The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics. Laidlaw, James Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 130-154.
• Heywood, Paolo (2018). The ontological turn: school or style? In Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. 224.
• Heywood, Paolo (2017). Moral Psychology: An Anthropological Perspective. In Moral Psychology. 43.

Journal Article

• Heywood, Paolo (2023). Out of the ordinary: Everyday life and the “carnival of Mussolini”. American Anthropologist
• Heywood, Paolo (2022). Ordinary exemplars: cultivating the everyday in the birthplace of fascism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 64(1): 91-121.
• Heywood, Paolo, Candea, Matei, Wright, Fiona & Fedirko, Taras (2021). Freedom of Speech. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology
• Heywood, Paolo (2020). “All the Difference in the World” The Nature of Difference and Different Natures. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 004839312091794.
• Heywood, Paolo (2019). Fascism, uncensored. Terrain (72).
• Heywood, Paolo (2018). Making Difference: Queer Activism and Anthropological Theory. Current Anthropology 59(3): 314.
• Heywood, Paolo (2017). Comment on Interpreting Strathern's ‘unconscious’ critique of ontology. Social Anthropology 25(2): 221.
• Heywood, Paolo (2017). The Ontological Turn. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology
• Heywood, Paolo (2015). Agreeing to disagree: LGBTQ Activism and the Church in Italy. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 325.
• Heywood, Paolo (2015). Freedom in the code: The anthropology of (double) morality. Anthropological Theory 15(2): 200.
• Heywood, Paolo (2015). Equivocal locations: being ‘red’ in ‘Red Bologna’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(4): 855.
• Heywood, Paolo (2014). Neoliberal nation? Mobbing and morality in Italy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(1): 151.
• Heywood, Paolo & Laidlaw, James (2013). One more turn and you're there. Anthropology of this Century
• Heywood, Paolo (2012). Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on 'Ontology'. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30(1).
• Heywood, Paolo (2009). The two burials of Aldo Moro: sovereignty and governmentality in the anni di piombo. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 29: 1-29.
• Heywood, Paolo (2009). Topographies of love: two discourses on the Russian mail-order bride industry. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 29: 26-45.

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Heywood, Paolo (2023). Who's afraid of Mussolini's ghost? E-International Relations
• Heywood, Paolo, Shryock, Andrew, Ferrandiz, Francisco & Shoshan, Nitzan (2022). Fascist Afterlives: Thoughts on Dictators, Dead Bodies, and Bodies Politic. Comparative Studies in Society and History
• Heywood, Paolo (2020). The politics of prefiguration: fascist gestures in Predappio, Italy. Anthropological Theory Commons
• Heywood, Paolo & Spanu, Maja (2018). We need to talk about how we talk about Fascism. The Conversation