Luigi Sausa

Luigi Sausa is a linguistic anthropologist and researcher at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, where he completed his PhD in Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies in July 2025 with a dissertation on language practices, ideologies and mobility in Arab diaspora communities in Indonesia. His research interests range from linguistic anthropology to language documentation, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia and the Arab-Islamic world. He currently leads the ELDP (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme) project documenting the languages of the Punan Batu community in North Kalimantan, Borneo. His most recent work addresses Shiʿi intellectual networks between Indonesia and Iraq, the anthropological critique of AI-based automatic transcription tools, and the sociolinguistics of Filipino communities in Italy. He has carried out research and study periods in Indonesia (Sulawesi, Sumatra, Kalimantan), Palestine (An-Najah National University, Nablus) and Egypt (Dar Comboni Institute, Cairo), and took part in the Erasmus programme at INALCO in Paris. Alongside his academic work, he is active as a translator and interpreter from Indonesian: his projects include the Italian translation of the novel La notte dei mille inferni for Add Editore and interpreting work for Kompas TV during the papal visit to Indonesia.

E-mail: luigi.sausa@gmail.com / l.sausa@unior.it