My
research interests include images and visual culture, media and
mediation, memory and violence, specifically in Indonesia. I am
currently completing a book on the work of images in Indonesia’s
post-authoritarian public sphere. I look at range of images—from
political campaign stickers, to street art, to documentary photography,
to contemporary art work, to youtube videos and selfies—that circulate
in public giving form to people’s imaginings of Indonesia’s troubled
past, its democratic transition, and its uncertain and contested
future. My first book, Refracted Visions (Duke University Press, 2010)
examined the role of popular photography in the making of national
subjects and postcolonial Java. A recent project explored the
transformation of a powerful Javanese spirit queen into a national icon
featured in modern paintings, film, and popular art. I am
beginning work on a new project on memories of violence against the
ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia. I am interested in how
contemporary artists are giving visual form to memories that have been
excluded from public discourse and official by mining overlooked
material artifacts of violence. I teach at Queens College and the CUNY
Graduate Center.
Selected
Publications
“Beyond
the ‘Savage Slot’: Ethnography and the National Identity Photograph,”
in Photography, History, Difference, edited by Tanya Sheehan. Dartmouth
University Press, 2015. “Seeing the Unseen in Indonesia’s Public Sphere: Photographic Appearances of a Spirit Queen” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(1), January 2014: 1-33. "Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java," Duke University Press, Objects/Histories series April 2010. "The Face of Money: Crisis, Currency, and Remediation in Post-Suharto Indonesia" Cultural Anthropology 24(1), February 2009. "Cosmopolitan Visions: Ethnic Chinese
and the Photographic Envisioning of Indonesia in the 1950s" The Journal of
Asian Studies, 67, May 2008: 395-432. "Reformasi Through Our Eyes: Children as
Witnesses of History in Post-Suharto Indonesia," in Visual Anthropology
Review, 22(2), September 2006: 53-70. "Currency and Fingerprints: Authentic
Reproductions and Political Communication in Indonesia’s ‘Reform Era,’" Indonesia
70 (October 2000). |
Courses Taught:
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