Faculty

Allen Feldman

Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Allen Feldman

Phone: 212 998-5096
Email:

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 and the post 9/11 global war of terror. His research and teaching interests include visual culture, political aesthetics, political animality, and practice-led media research. 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.


Links

Degrees Held

  • Ph.D Cultural Anthropology Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research 1988
    Anthropology of the Body, Political Violence

Awards

  • 2000 : Oversea's Research Fellow, Human Sciences Research Council, University of Cape Town, South Africa
  • 1999 : H. F. Guggenheim Senior Fellowships for the Study of Violence and Human Aggression, New York.
  • 1998 : H. F. Guggenheim Senior Fellowships for the Study of Violence and Human Aggression, New York.
  • 1997 : H. F. Guggenheim Senior Fellowships for the Study of Violence and Human Aggression, New York.
  • 1995 : Oversea's Research Fellow, Human Sciences Research Council, University of Cape Town, South Africa
  • 1988 : Schoenbrod Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Political and Legal Theory. Office of the Dean, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, New York.

Courses

  • MCC-GE 2201 001 - Mediating The Bio-Political Body
  • MCC-GE 2112 - Politics of the Gaze: Sensory Formations of Modernity
  • E59.30002 - Mimesis and Mediation
  • AMST-GA 2250 - War and Media Theory
  • MCC-GE 2166 - The Global City and Media Ethnography: Practice Led Media Research

Selected Publications

  • Archives of the Insensible: War, Terror and Violence as Dead Memory. (Duke UP, 2010)
  • "Tracks on the Anthropological Machine: The Bio-graphics of Animality, Natality and Inhumanitas." In Governmentality and Humanity: Environments, Technologies, Rights and Relief, eds. Ticktin and Feldman. (Duke UP, 2009)
  • "The Structuring Enemy and Archival War." Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, Vol 124, no.4, 2009.
  • "The Actuarial Gaze: From, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 March, 2005.
  • "Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing and the Trauma Aesthetic." Biography an Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 27 Winter, 2004.
  • "Strange Fruit: The South African Truth Commission and the Demonic Economies of Violence." Social Analysis, Volume 46 no 3, Fall, 2003.
  • "Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice and Actuarial Violence." Radical History Review, Winter. Issue 85, 2003.
  • "Philoctetes Revisited: White Public Space and the Political Geography of Public Safety." Social Text 68,Vol. 19, no, 3, Fall. 2001.
  • "Der menshliche Touch: Zu einer historischen Anthropologie und Traumanlyse von selbstattigen Instrumenten." In ReMembering the Body. Ed. Garbiele Branstretter and Hortensia Volkers, Vienna: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001.
  • "Violence and Vision: the Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror." Public Culture, Volume 10, No. 1, Fall 1997.
  • "On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King." American Ethnologist, Volume 21, no. 2, 1994.
  • Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror In Northern Ireland (revised second printing, 1994, third printing, 1997) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  • The Northern Fiddler: Music and Musicians in Donegal and Tyrone. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1980.

Editorial Boards

  • Public Culture, Consulting Editor
  • Social Text, Consulting Editor
  • Cultural Studies, Consulting Editor

Research Interests

  • Political Animality
  • Visual Culture and Violence
  • Political Anthropology of the Body and the Senses
  • Archeology and Genealogy of Media and Technology
  • Media Ethnography and Geographies of Perception
  • Philosophy of Media
  • Performance Studies
  • Political Philosophy