Elizabeth Povinelli

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1991. She is the author of numerous books and essays as well as a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture.

Povinelli’s work has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This critical task is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory and grounded in the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. Her first two books examined the governance of the otherwise in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of recognition. In particular, they focused on impasses within liberal systems of law and value as they meet local Australian indigenous worlds, and the effect of these impasses on the development of legal and public culture in Australia. Her second two books, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, examine formations of the Late Liberal Anthropocene from the perspective of intimacy, embodiment, and narrative form.

Povinelli has also explored these questions in the short film, Karrabing, Low Tide Turning, selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival, Shorts Competition,When the Dogs Talked, and Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ which premiered at the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival. Povinelli and the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation received the MIFF 2015 Cinema Nova Award for Best Short Fiction Film for When the Dogs Talked. Povinelli is one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective, the recipient of the 2015 Visible Award. Povinelli also appeared in the documentary film Apparition of the Eternal Church (2006), directed by Paul Festa, about the French composer Olivier Messiaen's organ work.

She was the recipient of the German Transatlantic Program Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011.

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