Allen Feldman

Allen Feldman is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research on the politicization of the gaze, the body and the senses in Northern Ireland, South Africa, the post 9/11 global war of terror, and AIDS affected/infected homeless in NYC. His research and teaching interests include visual culture, political aesthetics, political animality, practice-led media research, and philosophy of media. Feldman is the author of the critically acclaimed book Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago UP 1991), numerous essays on political violence as visual and performance culture, and the forthcoming book Archives of the Insensible: War, Terror and Violence as Dead Memory (Duke UP 2010). He teaches seminars on visual culture, war and media theory, mediated embodiment, and the ethnography of media; he has also designed and implemented community based harm reduction interventions with the unhoused in New York.

Neni Panourgia

Deeply interested in “life” as a multiplicitous term, Dr. Neni Panourgia probes the institutional domains in which the mechanisms that constitute, maintain, sustain, or destroy life are contextualized, places such as the concentration camp, the prison, the school, or as she says “the camp and the prison as school.” She is interested in hospitals and cemeteries and a number of other locations that serve as a nexus of politics, ritual, kin, law, and the body. Neni Panourgia is an Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York city and has authored several works including her most recent book titled Dangerous Citizens (2008).

Rayna Rapp

Dr. Rapp has not only taken up the project of increased “pedagogical integration of theory and method across the bio-social disciplines,” but she has dedicated the time to serve as a much needed guide for students navigating the complex and sometimes daunting waters of IRB regulations. As a Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Dr. Rapp engages such topics as gender, reproduction, health, culture, and science and technology. Together with her colleague Dr. Faye Ginsburg, Rapp has begun research on cultural innovation in special education in New York City, and she is now observing scientific laboratories that study brain functions including memory, learning, and epigenetics.

Elizabeth Povinelli

Elizabeth Povinelli is a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She has several publications including The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneaology, and Carnality (2006). This book, as Povinelli herself writes, “examines how a set of ethical and normative claims about the governance of love, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there.” Her work has focused on “developing a critical theory of late liberalism.” With regard to this she says, “This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms.”

“…I want to show how the uneven distribution of the flesh—the creation of life-worlds, death-worlds, and rotting worlds—is a key way in which autology, genealogy, and their intimacies are felt, known, and expressed. The dynamic between carnality and the discourses of the autological subject and the genealogical society is in this sense more like a skein than a skin—like a length of yarn or thread wound loosely and coiled together, a flock of birds flying across the sky in a line, or a tangled or complex mass of material.” —The Empire of Love p.8 (2006)

Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin has made extraordinary contributions to anthropology, critically engaging the dicipline’s relationship with  medicine, politics, and now morality. Fassin has authored several books including his two most recent, When Bodies Remember. Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007) and The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009). His work deals with the politics of inequality, of suffering, and of compassion, as well as anthropology’s approach to morality as an object. Throughout his career, Fassin has been active in both research and action, working as an Administrator and Vice President of Médecins Sans Frontières for a number of years, and being a Founding Director of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux. He is currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

“When I talk of ‘moral anthropology’, the validity and relevance of which I assert here, I do not mean that I want anthropology to act for the good of humanity (which, anyway, would not be shameful) and anthropologists to become moralists (at least as part of their professional activity): I merely plead for an anthropology which has morals for its object – in other words, which explores how societies ideologically and emotionally found their cultural distinction between good and evil, and how social agents concretely work out this separation in their everyday life.” – Beyond good and evil? p.334 (2008)

Martha Poon

Martha Poon is completing dissertation work in the Science Studies Program at University of California San Diego. Her research traces the history of the commercial credit scoring technology called a FICO score, innovated by the firm Fair, Isaac & Company Incorporated. Through a Bourse Chateaubriand Fellowship she has been a visiting student at the CSI-ENSMP in Paris. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre on Organizational Innovation (Columbia University). Her most recent publication – awarded the 2008 Hacker-Mullins Prize from the Science Knowledge and Technology section of the American Sociological Association – is entitled ‘From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets: Commercial consumer risk scores and the making of subprime mortgage finance’ (Accounting, Organization and Society, 2009 (forthcoming). An article reporting on the earlier findings of her work can be found in the edited volume Market Devices (Blackwell, 2007).

Vyjayanthi Rao

Vyjayanthi Rao received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at Yale University prior to joining The New School.  Her research focuses on globalization, development and urbanism and she is working on a book project titled The Speculative Ethic and the Spirit of Globalization. Dr. Rao is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School and has many publications including the “The Future in Crisis: Mumbai’s 21st Century,” in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and ” How to Read a Bomb: Scenes from Bombay’s Black Friday,” in Public Culture. Her research intrests include anthropology and ethnography of South Asia, urban culture, architecture and infrastructure, monuments and material culture, displacement, memory and citizenship, ethics, aesthetics and globalization.