Natalia Castelnuovo Biraben is a social anthropologist who holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires. Since 2016, she has served as a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, affiliated with the Social Anthropology Section of the Institute of Anthropological Sciences, School of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires. She has also undertaken research stays at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico), the University of Lleida (Spain), and the Ibero-American Institute (Berlin, Germany). She teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and has offered undergraduate and graduate courses at universities in Argentina and abroad.

Castelnuovo Biraben’s work applies an anthropological and ethnographic perspective to the study of political processes shaped by development and territorial policies, as well as organisational dynamics and rights claims in Indigenous and Creole contexts in the Argentine Gran Chaco. She has conducted research and fieldwork in several northern provinces of Argentina, including Salta (the Yungas and Chaco regions), Santiago del Estero, Formosa, and Chaco.

Castelnuovo Biraben is the author and co-editor of books such as Mujeres guaraníes y procesos de participación política en el noroeste argentino and Antropología, violencia y justicia – Repensando matrices de la sociabilidad contemporánea en el campo del género y de la familia, among others. Her research has also been published in leading national and international academic journals, including Desacatos, Chungara, Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios Agrarios, Hunter Gatherer Research, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal of Latin American Geography, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Development, and The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

At SCAS, she intends to develop a book-length project that examines the intersections of memory, territory, mobility, and infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research, the project seeks to explore the shifting territorialities of Indigenous communities and Criollos stalls within the context of an ongoing broader process of spatial reconfiguration in the Pilcomayo region, a key landscape within the Argentine Gran Chaco, bordering Bolivia and Paraguay.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.