Research
I am currently working on three projects, all connected to mediations of memory and material/visual culture. My collaborative work with visual artist Selena Kimball (Parsons The New School, NY), 'Catalogue of Correspondence: A Collection of Rocks Found in the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture', incorporates experimental, decolonising approaches to engaging with anthropological museums and archives, proposing new forms and formulations of the ethnographic catalogue through affective, subjective and exploratory modes of artefact interpretation and categorisation.
My second project, 'The Silver Cord: Remediating Memory in the Family Archive', involves working with and re-editing a collection of 16mm silent home movies shot in the 1920s and '30s by my own ancestors who immigrated to New York from a small village in Belarus at the turn of the century. The work engages with broader anthropological debates investigating the entangled relationship between domestic archives, personal memory, and collective history, giving new filmic form to the roles and potentials of visual media in understanding what it means to view, reflect upon, and communicate about the past. It also draws upon methodologies inspired by the French Surrealists, engaging with the principle of automatism as an approach to access and articulate hidden memories, narratives and associations.
My third project concerns digital ontophanies and phenomenological approaches to screen-mediated communication, also in collaboration with Selena Kimball.
I would welcome the opportunity to supervise prospective PhD students interested in any of the above areas. I am currently supervising the following PhD students:
Shanshan Wu: The Breath of Memory: Transcultural Remembrance of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Chinese Moving Images
Sarah Okpokam: In Plain Sight: Photography and the Black Diaspora in Liverpool (1848 – 1948)
Visual anthropology and ethnographic film
Visual and material culture; the use of audio-visual media in research and fieldwork; experimental methodologies; intersections between the fields of anthropology and contemporary art; intersections between between anthropology and surrealism.
Everyday sites and practices of cultural memory
Unofficial and inadvertent memories; memory and forgetting; critical heritage studies; museums and archives; the relationship between remembrance work and audio-visual-sensory media/methods.
Romania and post-communism
Memory practices in the post-communist context; contemporary Romanian visual culture; post-communist transition; Eastern Europe.
Research grants
Little Familiar Objects: Decolonising Erland Nordenskiöld’s Colonial Rock Collection
BRITISH ACADEMY (UK)
August 2022 - August 2024