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Faculty Bio | |
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Brian Larkin
Associate Professor
Barnard College
Anthropology, Barnard College |
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Biography
Brian Larkin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College. He sits on the board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.
My research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly, I examine the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria - cinema, radio, digital media - and the religious, social and cultural changes they bring about. I am particularly interested in how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that can shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to cultural life. A central question in my work has been what would media theory look like if we approached it from the realities of media history in Nigeria? To this end, I emphasize both the powerful influence of communication media but also their failures and the breakdown endemic to technologies.
My current book provisionally titled, Secular Machines: Media and the Materiality of Islamic Revival, analyzes the role media play in the rise of new Islamic movements in Nigeria and explores the interaction of technology and religion.
Representative Publications:
2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2004. ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds. Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’. Public Culture 16(4):289-314.
2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press.
2008. ‘Introduction to Media and the Political Forms of Religion’. Special Edition of Social Text. 26(3): 1-9. Co-written with Charles Hirschkind.
2008. ‘Ahmed Deedat and the Form of Islamic Evangelism’. Social Text (26(3): 101-121.
2010. ‘Imperial Circulation: Cinema and the making of anxious colonialists’. In, Globalizing American Studies. Brian Edwards, Dilip Gaonkar eds. Chicago University Press.
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