Rosalind C. Morris
Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Rosalind Morris focuses her fieldwork in two main areas: Thailand and South Africa. Over the past decade, she has devoted her attention to thinking about a number of inter-related issues and questions concerning: the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development; the relationships between value and violence; the sexualization of power and desire; the theorization of gender; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her writings on all of these issues, she attends to questions of representation. Her writings include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, the archive of visual anthropology, and the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa’s mining towns. Other essays have addressed the history of fetishism, the violence of culture in anthropological theory, translation and radicalism, mediatic war, photography and its discontents, sex, gender and sexuality, and art in South Africa. She is a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture.
