Dr Stefan Tarnowski

Stefan Tarnowski is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Film & Screen Studies. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, he works across the fields of visual culture, science and technology studies, and media studies, and within the tradition of postcolonial studies. His ethnographic fieldwork focussed on media activism in the 2011 Syrian uprising and subsequent war, which was, until the Ukraine War, the most documented conflict in history. In particular, he examined the relationship between digital infrastructures, emergent forms of media activism, and the authoritative fields of journalism, humanitarianism, law, and cinema. He is currently completing his book manuscript, titled The Activist Subject. Each of the chapters follows how media activists and experts attempted to find technical and social solutions to problems of doubt, uncertainty, and deniability in the wake of the Syrian state banning entry to authoritative foreign journalists and humanitarian observers.

Stefan Tarnowski previously held a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus and a postdoctoral fellowship on the ‘Views of Violence’ project at the University of Copenhagen. He received his doctorate from Columbia University’s Anthropology Department, with additional certificates from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Centre for Comparative Media. His research has been published in Visual Anthropology, American Ethnologist, World Records Journal, and Film Quarterly, among others. He writes regularly for public-facing outlets, including the London Review of Books (mainly the blog), and the New York Review of Books. He has also worked as a researcher and subtitler for a number of artists and filmmakers. At Corpus, he is currently the Director of Studies for Middle East Studies.