Contributors for

Off State/On Display

Walter Armbrust is a lecturer at St. Antony's College, Oxford, where he holds the Albert Hourani Chair in Middle East Studies.  His research focuses on popular and mass culture, modernity, film studies, and Egyptian society.  He is the author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996) and editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000).

Kelly M. Askew is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan.  She is the author of Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (2002) and editor, with Richard Wilk, of The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (2002).  Askew was also an associate producer and editor for the documentary series Rhythms from Africa.  She works in East Africa and among Swahili diaspora communities in the Middle East.  Her most recent research "Zanzibar Revelations: Remembered Futures, Dismembered Pasts" traces the global circulation of memories and interpretations of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

John F. Collins is an assistant professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.  He received hi Ph.D. in Ethnology from the University of Michigan in 2003.  His dissertation, The Revolt of the Saints: Popular Memory, National Culture, and Urban Space in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy, examines the making of a heritage center in the city of Salvador, Bahia, with particular attention to how state authorities and residents of the historical neighborhood negotiate concepts of culture, history, and personhood.

Andreas Glaeser is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.  He is the author of Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany and the Berlin Police (1999) and "Placed Selves: The Role of Space in Identity Formation Processes of Eastern and Western Berlin Police Officers after German Unification," Social Identities, 1998.  Glaeser is currently exploring how the meaning of Germany as a corporate entity is negotiated in the context of the government's move from Bonn to Berlin.  He is also considering how organizational forms, ideologies, and personal desires interact in processes of reality construction among officers of the former secret police of the GDR.

Michael Herzfeld is a professor of social anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.  He is interested in social theory, history and anthropology, social poetics, the politics of history, Europe (especially Greece and Italy), and Thailand.  He is the author of numerous books, including Anthropology Through the Looking Glass (1987), A Place in History (1991), Cultural Intimacy (1997), and Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society (2001).

Richard Maddox is a professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University.  He has done fieldwork in Ecuador and Spain.  He is the author of El Castillo: The Politics of Tradition in an Andalusian Town (1993), winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association and the Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association.  His current research focuses on the state and public culture in contemporary Europe, and his latest book, The Best of All Possible Islands: Seville's Universal Exposition, the "New Spain," and the "New Europe," is forthcoming.

J. Lorand Matory is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of Anthropology and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University.  His research interests include the anthropology of religions, spirit possession, gender, ethnicity, and transnationalism.  He has done fieldwork in West Africa and in the African diasporas of the Americas.  Matory is the author of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (1994).

Rosalind Morris is an associate professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University.  She has conducted fieldwork in Thailand, on questions of modernity, mass media, spirit possession, gender, and sexuality; and in South Africa, on mining, value, and languages of violence.  Morris is the author of In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (2000).  Her recent essays include "Theses on the Questions of War: History, Media, Terror" (Social Text 2002) and "Failures of Domestication: Speculations on Globality, Economy, and the Sex of Excess in Thailand" (differences 2002).

Esra Özyürek is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.  Her interests include secularism and Islam, ideologies of the state, citizenship, alternative modernities, memory, nationalism, and gender. Özyürek is the author of Remembering in Forgetting: Social Memory in Turkey (2001), and her latest writing project is Nostalgia for the Modern: Privatization of State Ideology in Turkey, a monograph based on her dissertation.

Andrew Shryock is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.  He has done ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen, Jordan, and among Arab immigrant and ethnic communities in Detroit.  His recent work has dealt with the politics of hospitality and the creation of cultural mainstreams.  He is the author of Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and the Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (1997) and editor, with Nabeel Abraham, of Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (2000).