Professor of Anthropology

Member, Committee on Global Thought

Rosalind Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her earlier scholarship focused on the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development, particularly in the encounter between old and new forms of mediation. More recently, she has been writing an ethnography of South Africa’s mining communities. Traversing these fields of inquiry, her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence; aesethetics and the political; the sexualization of power and desire; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her formally wide-ranging writings on all of these issues, she attends specifically to the problem of language, and the matter of representation.

Professor Morris has served as a Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and is the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture. She is also the founding editor of “The Africa List,” for Seagull Books.

Curriculum Vitae

• Rosalind C. Morris CV

Website

• Anthropology Faculty Profile: Rosalind C. Morris
• Public Culture Profile: Rosalind C. Morris

Select Publications

• “Theses on the New Offentlichkeit” (2013).
• “O, Loss Vegas” (from the “American Mythologies” series), convolution 1(122-35) (2012).
• “Cinema (noir) and Vernacular (black) Modernism in South Africa.” Encyclopedia of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012).
• “In the Name of Trauma: Notes on Testimony, Truth-Telling and the Secret of Literature in South Africa,” Comparative Literature Studies, 48.3(2011):388-416.
• “Populist Politics in Asian Networks: Positions for Rethinking the Question of Political Subjectivity,” Special 20th anniversary issue of positions. Ed Tani Barlow. 20.1(2011):37-65.

Select Honors and Awards

• Lenfest Prize, for excellence in teaching and scholarship, Columbia University (2013).
• Fellow, Institute for Cultural Technology and Media Philosophy (January to June) (2013).
• Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, 3 months per year (2011-14)
• Conference grant, Confucius Institute, for “Capital, Class and Culture in ‘Asia’ (What is the Subject of the Political?)” (2011)
• Conference grant, Weather East Asia Institute, for “Capital, Class and Culture in ‘Asia’ (What is the Subject of the Political?)” (2011)

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Chicago
• M.A., Anthropology, York University, Canada
• B.A., Anthropology/English, University of British Columbia, Canada