People

Researchers

Peter Skafish

Peter Skafish is a cultural anthropologist who works between anthropology and philosophy on the question of what human thinking is, both in and outside modernity. He has a PhD in Anthropology from The University of California, Berkeley and has held the positions of Maître de conférences associé at the Collège de France, in Paris; Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in McGill University’s Department of Anthropology; Fondation Fyssen postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale and the Collège de France; and visiting faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to writing the introduction to the English translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s De Montaigne à Montaigne and co-editing the book Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, he has published essays in forums such as Angelaki, Common Knowledge, Cultural Anthropology, and Qui Parle. He is also a translator, including of Catherine Malabou’s The Heidegger Change and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics (both of which he also introduced) and, the editor of the ISCI’s journal, The Otherwise. He is currently completing the book Rough Metaphysics: Speculative Thought in an American Channel (An Anthropology of Concepts) and was recently a research fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Eric Macedo

Eric Macedo is a social anthropologist, working on themes related to colonialism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, and alterity relations. He has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where he also held a postdoctoral position. He was recently a fellow in the scientific sphere of practice of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, Germany. His writings have appeared in publications such as Antropolítica, Viso, PISEAGRAMA and Mana. In his doctoral thesis, he describes the historical process of colonization in the region around the city of Altamira, in the Brazilian Amazon, and the changes introduced by the construction of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric dam. He has also worked as a field researcher in the project "Indicadores de Belo Monte” of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo. He is currently writing a book on images of extraterrestrial beings in science fiction narratives, with a particular interest in crossings between multispecies and decolonial perspectives. He is a member of the artistic collective mordo and moderates the SO FAR reading group at diffrakt: centre for theoretical periphery, in Berlin.

Summer Faculty

David Grubbs

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). Good night the pleasure was ours is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2022.

Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, chair of the board of directors of Blank Forms, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.

Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University and the author of the books Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity, In a Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and The End of Normal, and, most recently, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam also recently published Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and is currently working on a companion volume titled The Wild Beyond: Art, Architecture, and Anarchy.  

Tavia Nyong’o

Tavia Nyong’o teaches black and queer studies at Yale University, where he is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies. He is the author of two books, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, along with numerous articles in academic and art venues. He co-edits the book series Sexual Cultures for New York University Press. 

Damon Young

Damon R. Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in the Program in Critical Theory, Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies and the co-editor, with Nico Baumbach and Genevieve Yue, of “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism,” a special issue of Social Text, and, with Joshua Weiner, of “Queer Bonds,” in GLQ.