Hussein Ali Agrama, University of Chicago -

(PhD, Johns Hopkins, 2005) Associate Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College, has ongoing research interests in the anthropology of law, religion, Islam and Judaism in the Middle East and Europe; secularism, colonial power, and the genealogies of sovereignty and emergency states; and contemporary practices of religious and secular embodiment.

 

Paper: After Muslims: Secrecy and Blasphemy in Modern Liberal State

 

Lisa Davis, Princeton University -

Elizabeth Anne Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her research and writing explore the intersections of the psyche, the body, history, and power in the experience of Greek- and Turkish-speaking communities in the Mediterranean region. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the multicultural borderland between Greece and Turkey. She has also written on crisis and the suicide “epidemic” in Greece, and is currently completing her second book, The Good of Knowing: War, Time, and Transparency in Cyprus, a collaborative engagement with Cypriot knowledge production about political violence in the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, documentary film, and “conspiracy theory.” These projects share a focus on the epistemological, ethical, and political stakes of scientific knowledge in its local and global forms. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009, Davis taught in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and at Columbia University as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. In 2017-18, she is an ACLS/Frederick Burkhardt Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

 

Paper: The President’s Body: “Conspiracy Culture” and the Problem of Missing Persons in Cyprus

 

Joseph Masco, University of Chicago -

Masco writes and teaches courses on science and technology, U.S. national security culture, political ecology, mass media, and critical theory. He is most recently the author of Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2014), which locates the origins of the present-day U.S. counterterrorism apparatus in the Cold War's "balance of terror." His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His previous work, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), was the winner of the J. I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research and the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

 

Paper: A False Flag