Symposium - Participants Bios

Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he is also an Associate Member of the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He is a faculty member in the summer program at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and he has been the Benjamin Menschel Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at Cooper Union. He is the author of “Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History”, “Emerson and the Climates of History”, and, with Fazal Sheikh, of “Fazal Sheikh: Portraits”. He also has co-edited “Who Comes After the Subject?”, “Cities Without Citizens”, a special issue of the “South Atlantic Quarterly” entitled “And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights”, and “The Itinerant Languages of Photography”. He has co-curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Storefront for Art and Architecture in N​ew York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum. He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot, and recently has introduced and co-translated Nadar's memoirs, “Quand j'étais photographe”. A collection of his essays on photography has appeared in Spanish under the title “La imagen en ruinas”, and his book “Paper Graveyards: Essays on Art and Photography” is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Zahid Chaudhary is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He specializes in postcolonial studies, visual cu​lture, and critical theory. His first book, “Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-century”, provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analyzing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory, and embodiment. His current book project, “Impunity: Notes on a Global Tendency”, analyzes juridical, economic, political, and aesthetic aspects of the practices of impunity from the Cold War to the present, from postcolonial states to the United States. The book considers documentary film, contemporary art, development projects, and architecture. He has written on Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” and on Fazal Sheikh’s aerial photographs in the photographer’s “Desert Bloom”.

Tom Cohen is Professor of English at SUNY, Albany, and the Director of the Institute for Critical Climate Change. He is the author of “Anti-Mimesis—from Plato to Hitchcock, Ideology and Inscription—“Cultural Studies” after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin”, and a two-volume work entitled “Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies”. He is also the editor of “Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change”, and co-author, with Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, of “Theory in the Disappearing Future—de Man on Benjamin”. Cohen has lectured and taught widely internationally, including assignments in China and Fulbright sponsored work in Thailand. He has essays in forthcoming volumes or special journal issues on Nietzsche and Media, War, Digital Theory, the Materialist Spirit, The Technologies of ‘The Book,’” Deconstruction and “Life,” among others. Book projects that are “in progress” include a monograph on the Brazilian director Jorge Padilha’s “Bus 174” and cinema “after” biopolitics; and a monograph on “Oil and the Image”.

Joan Fontcuberta is a Spanish photographer who teaches at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His many photographic publications include “Herbarium”, “Fauna”, “Artifical History”, “Sputnik”, “Twilight Zones”, “Contranatura”, “Landscapes Without Memory”, “The Photography of Nature and the Nature of Photography”, and “Joan Fontcuberta: Paralipomena”. He also has published four books of essays on photography: “The Kiss of Judas: Photography and Truth”, “Science and Friction: Photography, Nature, Artifice”, “Pandora’s Camera: Photogr@phy After Photography”, and, most recently, “La Furia de las imagenes”. He is the recipient of several awards, including the David Octavius Hill Medal from the Fotografisches Akademie GDL in Germany, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of Cu​lture in France, The National Photography Award in Spain, and, in 2013, the Hasselblad International Photography Award.

Raviv Ganchrow is currently a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, University of the Arts, The Hague. His work researches the interdependencies between sound, place, and listening, aspects of which are explored through installations, writing, and the development of pressure-forming and vibration-sensing technologies. Recent installations examine context-dependent sites of contemporary listening relating to environmental infrasound (“Long-Wave Synthesis”), mineral piezoelectricity (“Quarzbrecciakammer”), materiality of radio transmission (“Radio Plays Itself, Forecast for Shipping & Spark-Gap”), and anechoic chambers (“Padded Sounds”). The latest work (“Agora Circuit”) rewires in-situ human-mineral binds by way of an expansive circuit at the ancient agora of Messene. His ongoing “Listening Subjects” project tests an ambient circuitry whereby audibility, surroundings, and subjectivity are mutually conductive.

Tom Keenan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Human Rights Program at Bard College. His research interests revolve around media and conflict, literary and political theory, humanitarianism and human rights, and violence and politics. In the field of human rights, he has worked closely with the Soros Documentary Fund, “WITNESS”, and “The Journal of Human Rights”. He is the author of “Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics”, and of several essays on matters of surveillance, digital warfare, and global information networks. Together with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, he edited a collection of essays that explore the age of digital cult​ure, “New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader”. He is also the co-editor of “The End(s) of Museum” (with John G. Hanhard), “The Human Snapshot” (with Tirdad Zolghadr), and “The Flood of Rights” (with Suhail Malik and Tirdad Zolghadr). He is also an editorial and advisory board member of “Journal of Human Rights”, “Grey Room”, and “Humanity”.

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-born, Berlin-based visual artist. Raised between Casablanca and Paris, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts. Her practice, based on film, installation, photography, and printmaking, articulates relations among language, subjectivity, and geographical explorations. Each of her projects investigates strategies and discourses of resistance as elaborated, developed, and narrated by individuals, often members of political minorities rendered invisible by the nation-state model. She has had solo shows at the MOMA in New Y​ork, the MRS in Boston, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the MACBA in Barcelona, and the Sessession in Vienna. She has received numerous awards, including the Ibsen Award and the Abraaj Art Prize and, in 2018, she was a finalist for both the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize. She is a Professor of Contemporary Art at The Oslo National Art Academy and a founding member of “La Cinémathèque de Tanger”, an artist-run non-profit organization developing film cul​ture in Northern Morocco.

Yates McKee teaches art history in the CUNY system and is an organizer with the MTL Collective, Decolonize This Place, and the CUNY Climate Action Lab. He is the author of “Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition” and co-editor of the collection “Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism”. His writing has appeared in “October, Grey Room”, the “Oxford Art Journal”, “The Nation”, and “Artforum”, and he has written on matters of climate justice in the work of several artists, including Subhankar Banerjee and Allora / Calzadilla.

Susan Meiselas is a Magnum photographer and presently the President of the Magnum Foundation. She is best known for her project on carnival strippers, her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, and her six-year project curating a hundred-year photographic history of Kurdistan. She has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Y​ork, and her work is included in collections around the world. She has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “outstanding courage and reporting” for her work in Nicaragua, the Leica Award for Excellence, the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award, and the Harvard Arts Medal. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Her most recent exhibitions have included retrospectives of her work at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the SFMOMA.

Rosalind Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of “The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses's”, “The Worship of Fetish Gods and its Legacies”, with Daniel Leonard, “Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines, 1906”, with William Kentridge, “That Which is Not Drawn: William Kentridge in Conversation with Rosalind Morris”, and she has edited “Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, and Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia”. In 2011, Morris created “RoCaM Productions LLC,” to make her first narrative feature film. Starring Bill Griffin and Eric T. Miller, “Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie” is based on her own adaptation of Stein’s last novella, published in 1946, and was released in 2014. With co-librettist Yvette Christiansë and composer Zaid Jabri, she is also the co-creator of a major new opera entitled Cities of Salt, based on the novel by Abdelrahman Munif.

Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New Yo​rk University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He works in the areas of black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory, and sound studies. He is author of “In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition”, “Hughson’s Tavern”, “B. Jenkins”, “The Feel Trio”, “The Little Edges”, and a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is “consent not to be a single being”. Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study”, “A Poetics of the Undercommons”, and, with Wu Tsang, of “Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution)”. He recently participated in a panel discussion at the Tisch School of Arts entitled “What Difference Does the Digital Make: Critical Encounters at the Edges of Psychoanalysis and Technology.”

Jean-Luc Nancy is the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. He has taught at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg, and has been a guest professor at numerous universities, including the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Berkeley. His work is very diverse and he has written on Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida. He has explored the question of community, the nature of the political, German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, literature, technology, and hermeneutics, and he also has written several books on the arts and on filmic and photographic images, including “Multiple Arts”, “The Ground of the Image”, “Portrait”, “The Muses”, “Being Nude: The Skin of Images”, and “The Evidence of Film”.

RaMell Ross is a Providence, Rhode Island-based writer, photographer, filmmaker, and Mellon Gateway Fellow and Assistant Professor in Brown University's Visual Art Department. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he has received gra​nts from the Sundance Institute and Tribeca Film Institute for his experimental documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2018. “Hale County” has won several awards, including the “U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision” at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival 2018, the “Reva & David Logan Grand Jury Award” at the 2018 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the “Best Documentary Award” at the 2018 Gotham Awards, and has been nominated for an Oscar this year.

Sharon Sliwinski is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work forges a bridge between the fields of visual cu​lture, political theory, and the life of the mind. Her first book, “Human Rights In Camera”, explored the visual politics of human rights. She has contributed broadly to the field of photography studies, most recently co-editing “Photography and the Optical Unconscious”. Sliwinski’s most recent work investigates the social, political, and cultural significance of dream-life, which is represented in her book “Dreaming Dark Times” and in her project, “The Museum of Dreams”. In 2017, she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and she currently holds the 2017-19 Rogers Chair in Journalism & New Information Technology. She also has been a long-time member of the research collective known as the “Toronto Photography Seminar”.

Liana Theodoratou is Clinical Professor and Director of the A. S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies at Ne​w York University. She is also the Director of the NYU in Athe​ns Institute in A​thens. Trained as a classicist, she now specializes in Modern Greek literature and cult​ure, with particular interests in poetry, film, music, and theater. She has worked for the Greek Ministry of Cul​ture, and she has served on the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association. She has published widely on Modern Greek poetry and presently finishing a book entitled “Mourning Becomes Greece: Poetry of the Greek Civil War”. She also has translated several works by Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida into Modern Greek.

Christina Varvia is an architectural researcher and Deputy Director of Forensic Architecture. She is a graduate of the AA School of Architecture and Westminster University. Her previous research includes studies on digital media and memory as well as the perception of the physical environment through scanning and imaging technologies, research that she deploys through time-based media. She joined the Forensic Architecture team in 2014, where she has developed methodologies for the “Rafah: Black Friday Report”, which reconstructed one day in the 2014 war in Gaza, “Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison”, “77 sqm, 9:26 minutes”, “The Murder of Pavlos Fyssas”, and many other projects and exhibitions.

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010 he founded the research agency Forensic Architecture. The work of the agency is documented in the exhibition and book “FORENSIS”, as well as in “Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability”, and in numerous exhibitions worldwide. In 2007, he established, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sabour/Palestine. This work is documented in the book “Architecture After Revolution”. His other books include “The Conflict Shoreline”, “Mengele’s Skull” (with Tom Keenan), “The Least of All Possible Evils”, “Hollow Land”, and “A Civilian Occupation”. He is on the editorial board of “Third Text, Humanity, Cabinet, and Political Concepts” and is on the board of directors of the Center for Investigative Journalism and on the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court in the The Hague.