Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She completed her PhD in Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Her scholarship involves both the analysis and production of images. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry during its digitalization at the beginning of the 21st century. She is also the director of Coffee Futures, an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune-telling. (www.coffeefuturesfilm.com) Recently she has been researching photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman period. Specifically she is investigating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909) from medical imagery to prison portraiture to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjects. As a NOMIS Fellow at eikones she will be working on Portraits of Unbelonging, the first in-depth exploration of the official role of photography in the history of Armenian emigration to the United States.
eikones has announced four new NOMIS Postdoctoral Fellowship recipients for 2018-2019: Zeynep Gürsel, Sean Silver, Philipp Ekardt and Tobias Wilke. eikones — Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University […]