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![Allen wears black rimmed glasses and a fedora hat. He has a white beard and stands in front of his office bookcase.](/sites/default/files/styles/nyu_profile_image/public/2023-11/Feldman-Panama-Photo_web.jpg?h=99d1d367&itok=6D6M6h8A)
Allen Feldman
Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
Media, Culture, and Communication
Allen Feldman, a pioneer in the ethnography of violence, the body and the senses, is the author of Archives of the Insensible: of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (University of Chicago, 2015) and Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991).
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.
Of his work Avital Ronell says “Archives of the Insensible will become the go-to work to help us confront unmanageably traumatizing realities by which we are seized and the cutthroat politics of our era.” And Talal Asad writes “Archives of the Insensible is a remarkable diagnosis of our time, tracing with great subtlety the multiple ways in which violence is transformed into justice and justice gives birth to destruction.”
Selected Publications
- Archives of Insensible; of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015) http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo20619377.html
- Éamonn O’Doherty and the Gaze of Common Places, Field Day Review, 9, 2013, A special issue dedicated to Derry and environs in celebration of Derry/Londonderry City of Culture 2013. (link)
- The Disputation of Ashraf Salim: Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at Guantanamo, Cultural Studies, Fall 2012, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2012.733172 (link)
- "Tracks on the Anthropological Machine. In The Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and Care, 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.