Visiting Professor, 2007-2009

Christopher Pinney (Ph.D. 1987, London School of Economics) joined the Department as Visiting Crowe Professor in Spring 2007. His research has a strong geographic focus in central India: his initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-resident factory workers. Subsequently he researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular media (see eg. Camera Indica and Photos of the Gods).

He is currently interested in cultural spaces which conventional social theory has tended to neglect: “more than local and less than global”, and spaces of cultural flow that elude the west. In addition to ongoing projects with an Indian focus (for instance, a filmic record of two central Indian Dalit intellectuals) he is also working on visual dimensions of cultural encounters from 1492 to the present, and thinking through Kracauer’s later work and the question of ‘multiple temporalities’. Current book projects include, Lessons From Hell (concerned with popular Indian depictions of punishment), a ‘visual history’ of modern India, and Visual Encounters.

During the 2007-08 academic year he gave lectures and seminar presentations at Ohio State University, SALC at the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, Goldsmiths, NYU, and ASU (Phoenix). He gave conference presentations in “Authorizing Inscriptions” at the University of California Davis, in “Decentering Gazes” at the University of Vienna, in “The Aesthetics of Political Transformation in South Asia” at the University of Amsterdam, in the “Indian Cinema Symposium” at the University of Westminster, and in “Painted Photographs” organized by the Alkazi Collection of Photography at SOAS, He participated in a residential seminar “Images that Move” at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, gave a plenary address at the Society for Cultural Anthropology annual meeting at Long Beach, and the Annual Lecture of the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney.

Pinney made two research trips to India in 2008. In January he visited Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Kolkata. In September he visited Delhi (where he lectured at Jamia Millia Islamia University, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and Jawaharlal Nehru University), Madhya Pradesh, Mumbai and Bangalore (where he gave a Tenth Anniversary Lecture at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society).

A recent Tehelka interview about his Indian research is available here.

His new website makes available an expanding South Asian visual archive for researchers and teachers.

Curriculum Vitae