Faculty
Sharon Sliwinski
Doctoral Membership
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
Email
Education: MA; PhD, York (Social and Political Thought)
Research Interests
My research interests range across a number of topics, from the intersection of politics and aesthetics, to the genealogy of key concepts in human rights discourse, to more theoretical investigations in psychoanalysis and the terrain of the imaginary. One of the common threads across these fields has been a fascination with photography – with individual photographers, subjects, and images, but also with the medium itself as a means through which humanity can become a community of witnesses to world events. This was the subject of my book Human Rights In Camera (Chicago 2011 http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo12079675.html).
At present I am working on a new project called Dream Matters, which is a study of the social and political significance of dream-life. What is under investigation here is how this product of an individual mind can become a matter that exceeds the dimensions of the self, how dreams can reveal something otherwise overlooked about the milieu of their gestation.
Recent Publications: Human Rights In Camera (University of Chicago Press, 2011), and "Air War and Dream" in American Imago (2011), and "The Gaze Called Animal" in The New Centennial Review (2011); “Icarus Returned: The Falling Man and the Survival of Antiquity” In Contemporary Art/Classical Myth, Eds. Isabele Loring Wallace and Jennifer Hersh (Surrey: Ashgate) forthcoming; “On Photographic Violence” Photography and Culture (2009); “The Aesthetics of Human Rights,” Culture, Culture, Theory & Critique, (2009); "New York Transfixed: Notes on the Expression of Fear,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, (2008); “The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo,” Journal of Visual Culture (2006); “Camera War, Again,” Journal of Visual Culture (2006).
Theses Supervised:
- Noel Glover: Shame and the Sharing of Existence, MA thesis, 2012
