VISITING FELLOWS

FALL 2020 FELLOWS

STEVEN FELD

Steven Feld is a filmmaker, sound artist/performer, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. After studies in music, film, and photography, he received the Ph.D in Anthropological Linguistics at Indiana University in 1979. From 1976 he began a research project in the Bosavi rainforest of Papua New Guinea. Results include the monograph Sound and Sentiment (republished 2012 in a 3rd and 30th anniversary edition), a co-authored Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary, and essays, some published in his co-edited books Music Grooves and Senses of Place. From this work he also produced audio CD projects including Voices of the Rainforest, Rainforest Soundwalks, and Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea. Key theoretical themes developed in this work are the anthropology of sound and voice; acoustemology (acoustic epistemology), sound as a way of knowing.

Feld is also know for experimental and dialogic writing, recording, and filmmaking. Work after 2000 has concentrated on related themes in the study of bells in Europe, Japan, Ghana, and Togo, published in CDs, DVDs, and books like The Time of Bells, Skyros Carnival, and Santi, Animali, e Suoni. He has also written on music globalization and problems of music as cultural and intellectual property. His work in visual anthropology includes short and feature films and the book Ciné-Ethnography, on the work of French anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch. He just completed a ten year project on jazz in West Africa, published in the twelve CD, five DVD, and book set Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra. Feld’s research has been supported by NSF, HEH, NEA, Wenner-Gren and other foundations, and honored by MacArthur, Guggenheim, SAR, and Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences fellowships, the Koizumi Fumio Prize, and film and book awards, including SAR’s J.I. Staley Prize.

CHRISTINA KNIGHT

Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College. Before joining the Haverford faculty, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College as well as a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow. Knight’s work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on representations of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Additionally, she is the director of knightworks dance theater, which she co-founded with her sister in 2013.

SPRING 2020 FELLOWS

Emily Carris is an Artist and Founding Member of The Art Dept. Collective , a collaborative vintage store and workshop space dedicated to sharing stories and uplifting underserved artists. She has a BA in Education and Photography from Eugene Lang College in New York. She holds a Master's degree in photography from UCA in Kent, England.

Her work exploring the personal and cultural legacy of slavery and the Black female body has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Emily has worked as photography teacher and museum educator at the International Center of Photography in New York. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia.

Wayne Modest is the head of the Research Center of Material Culture. He is also professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies (by special appointment) in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU). Modest was previously, head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London, and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica.

He has held visiting scholar positions at the Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University and the School for Museums Studies, New York University. Wayne Modest’s work is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to material culture/museum collections. His research interests include issues of belonging and displacement; material mobilities; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; difficult/contested heritage (with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism); Caribbean Thought. More recently Modest has been researching and publishing on heritage and citizenship in Europe with special attention for urban life, and on ethnographic museums and questions of redress/repair.

FALL 2019 FELLOW

Ernst Karel works with sound, including experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, electroacoustic music, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm [film/video]. His work focuses on the practice of location recording and composing with unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines these with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary. His work has been presented at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Arsenal, Berlin; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among others. Sound installations with Helen Mirra have been exhibited at the Gardner Museum in Boston, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Bienal. Video with multichannel sound collaborations include Ah humanity! (2015, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) and Single Stream (2014, with Toby Lee and Pawel Wojtasik). He completed his PhD on the anthropology of sound in the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago, in 2003. At the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, he collaborated on sound for vilms including The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan, and developed and taught a practice-based course in 'sonic ethnography.' Currently he is working through the archive of tape recordings from the so-called Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, 1961, in collaboration with Veronika Kusumaryati.

SPRING 2019 FELLOW

AIMEE MEREDITH COX

Aimee Meredith Cox is jointly appointed as an Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Cox earned her M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Vassar College. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women’s Studies Association. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan) and co-editor of a special issue of Public: A Journal of Imagining America on art and knowledge production in the academy. Cox is also a former professional dancer. She danced on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and toured extensively with Ailey II. Her next ethnographic project, Living Past Slow Death, explores the creative protest strategies individuals and communities enact to reclaim Black life in the urban United States.

FALL 2018 FELLOW

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides training and equipment access to community groups and the independent film/video community. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” 1996-2001, two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His award-winning documentaries, The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in in Four Voices, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown, have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums throughout the US, Europe and Africa. In 2011, he was commissioned to create a five channel permanent video installation for the National Park Service’s President’s House historic site. Currently, Massiah is executive producing two major community oral history projects, the Precious Places Community History project, a video project designed by Massiah and composed of 73 short documentaries produced collaboratively with neighborhood organizations in Philadelphia and Chester, PA, as well as Camden, NJ. He also is producing the Muslim Voices of Philadelphia community history project.