Dr Stefan Tarnowski

I am an anthropologist working across media anthropology, political theory, and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on the aftermaths of the 2010-11 Arab Revolutions. My research and teaching interests include media infrastructures and technologies, film and intellectual history, revolution and revolt, truth and politics, politics and aesthetics, and humanitarianism and human rights.

My book manuscript, based on my doctoral thesis, is about militancy and media activism in Syria, taking a global and regional perspective. Each chapter begins by focussing on a media technology, infrastructure or organisation, and then thinks through the kinds of conundrums that come to the fore when struggles over narrative intensify, or when politics and technologies become shrouded in conditions of epistemological murk. There's a particular focus on images, often footage uploaded and posted on social media, as well as the rhetoric of activists and their opponents, and the political, social, and epistemological implications of the circulation and recirculation of these images and discourses.

In addition, I’m working on three postdoctoral projects. The first is a special issue of the documentary cinema journal World Records, taking as a starting point the Syrian diasporic organisation Bidayyat, and reading the decade of films produced through a concept of generations. The second is a book of collected essays on Abounaddara, an anonymous collective of filmmakers, looking at their films, their essays on dignity and the right to the image, and their ongoing research project on Soliman al-Halabi, the archaeology of representations, and the dilemmas of postcolonial restitution. The third will continue my research into the aftermaths of the Arab Revolutions, shifting focus to Lebanon. Based on three years living through Lebanon’s belated uprising and coeval collapse, it’s planned as an ethnographic account of average everydayness in extraordinary times.

I grew up mainly between the UK and Lebanon, apart from a few early childhood years spent in Poland. I received my BA from the University of Oxford in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Islamic History). I then moved back to Lebanon where I worked as a contemporary art curator and critic. In Spring 2022, I received my doctorate from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology, with additional certificates from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Center for Comparative Media. My research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Weber Stiftung, and the Arab Council for Social Sciences amongst others. My writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in World Records, Film Quarterly, the London Review of Books, and the Review of Middle East Studies. I’ve also worked as a  researcher, subtitler, and translator for a number of artists and filmmakers.