Dr. Aitzpea Leizaola (Donostia, 1971) is Associate professor of Social Anthropology at the University of the Basque Country, where she is currently the head of the Anthropology Master. She studied Social Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Paris X Nanterre, where she obtained her PhD. She has been Basque
Visiting fellow at the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Specialized in the study of Basque Culture, her research interests are mainly in political and
symbolic anthropology with a special focus on border studies, identity and heritage,
memory studies and popular forms of protest. She directed “Ahoy, pirates!” (2013) an
ethnographic documentary (Visual Fest prize 2014, Rome). She has carried out
extensive and multi-sited fieldwork in the Basque Country and in Spain on the memory
of Spanish Civil War, and more recently, in Turkey, where she has done fieldwork
among the Sephardim community in Istanbul.