PROFILE
 

PhD, University of Chicago

Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology & Sociology at The Graduate Institute Geneva that she joined in 2016. She held the Chair of Cultural Anthropology of Contemporary Indonesia at Leiden University (2001-15), was Global Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Center for Religion & Media and Department of Anthropology (2009-12), Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University in 2014, Visiting Scholar at New York University – Shanghai’s Center for Global Asia in 2017, and Evans Fellow at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archeology & Anthropology and Department of Anthropology in 2020. She is the author of Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia, Fordham 2021, The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island, Duke 2000, co-editor of Images That Move, SAR Press, 2013 and the Handbook of Material Culture, Sage 2013 [2006], and editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, Routledge 1998. She has published, among other topics, on images, media, and visuality, archives, violence, and religion. Board and editorial positions include vice-chair of the Prince Claus Fund, member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, editorial board member of the Annual Review of Anthropology and, currently, member of the editorial collective of Positions: Asia Critique.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia New York: Fordham
  University Press, 2021
• Images That Move (co-editor, with Mary Margaret Steedly) Santa Fe, NM:  School of Advanced Research, 2013.
• Handbook of Material Culture (co-editor, with Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Michael Rowlands, Chris Tilley) London: Sage. Paperback edition, 2013.
• Handbook of Material Culture (co-editor, with Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Michael Rowlands, Chris Tilley) London: Sage, 2013

Articles

• Review, for book symposium on Carlos Fausto’s Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021
• “Someone Else Speaking: Reflections on Mary Steedly as Author and Anthropologist” with
  Smita Lahiri and Karen Strassler. In “Mary Steedly’s Anthropology of Modern Indonesia: A
  Collection of Keywords”, Indonesia 109 Guest Editors: Smita Lahiri, Patricia Spyer and Karen Strassler. April, 2020
• “Telltale.” Indonesia. Special Issue in Honor of Mary Margaret Steedly. Guest Editors Smita Lahiri, Patricia Spyer and Karen Strassler. In “Mary Steedly’s Anthropology of Modern Indonesia: A Collection of Keywords”, Indonesia 109 37-43. April, 2020
• “Mary Steedly’s Anthropology of Modern Indonesia: A Collection of Keywords”,
  Indonesia 109 (April). Guest Editors: Smita Lahiri, Patricia Spyer and Karen Strassler, 2020
• “Escalation: Assemblage, Archive, Animation.” History and Anthropology. Special Issue on
  “Ethnographies of Escalation” Guest Editor Lars Hojer*, 2020
• Review of Laura Sears’s Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. Indonesia 105: 215-220, 2018
• Review of Nils Bubandt’s The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. Anthropological Forum 27(2): 188-89, 2017
• “REEL Accidents: Screening the Ummah under Siege in Wartime Maluku” Current Anthropology, Vol. 58 (S15): 27-40 (Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 15), 2017
•  “Review Essay. The Spirit of Things in Southeast Asia” Bijdragen tot de Taal, Landen
  Volkenkunde, 2016
• “Streetwise Masculinity and Other Urban Performances of Postwar Ambon: A Photo-Essay” in Kathryn Robinson, ed. Growing Up in Indonesia: Experiences and Diversity in YouthTransitions (Leiden: Brill), 2016