Daria Trentini
Daria Trentini is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa). Her PhD in anthropology is from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, with a dissertation on traditional healers in Mozambique. Before joining Drake, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her areas of research are Eastern and Southern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. Her research interests include African medicine, spirit possession, anthropology of Islam, and political anthropology. Daria conducted fieldwork in the city of Nampula in northern Mozambique since 2007. She is currently exploring how the coexistence of Islam and matriliny endures in prevailing forms of spirit possession in Nampula. She is also working on a manuscript on the life and the work of a female healer in Mozambique for Rutgers University Press. Additional ethnographic projects concern the relationship between spirit possession, memory, and political violence.