Areas of Research/Interest
Global Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
Publications
Patricia Spyer, Global Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology and the Center for Religion and Media.
Patricia Spyer was educated in the Netherlands and the United States. After obtaining her PhD at the University of Chicago, she taught in the college as a William Rainey Harper Fellow before returning to the Netherlands where she was a founding member of the Research Centre Religion & Society at the University of Amsterdam. In 2001 she moved to Leiden University as Chair of the Cultural Anthropology of Contemporary Indonesia. Dr. Spyer was Senior Fellow at NYU's Center for Religion and Media (2006-7) and Visiting Professor at University of College London.
Dr. Spyer's work has been an ongoing engagement with a number of theoretical concerns that she explores and problematizes through ethnographic material collected largely-though by no means exclusively--through field research in Indonesia. Dr. Spyer's writings span issues of contemporary religion, modernity, and historical consciousness (The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island, 2000), while the problematics of materiality, mediation, and visuality have been central to her edited volume Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, a number of publications on photography, the co-edited Handbook of Material Culture, and the collaborative research program Signs of Crisis that Dr. Spyer co-directed with Dr. Mary Steedly of Harvard University. Since 2000 she has also worked with a number of documentary filmmakers and projects in Indonesia. In 2006, together with colleagues from the Center for Religion and Media, the Anthropology Department and the NYU School of Law, she organized and curated a conference at NYU on "Signs of Crisis: Religious Conflict, Human Rights, and the New Documentary Film in Southern Asia" which brought together documentarians from South and Southeast Asia with human rights activists, lawyers, and academic scholars.
Dr. Spyer co-edits the series Southeast Asia Mediated for the Dutch KITLV Press. She is currently completing a book Orphaned Landscapes: Religion, Visuality, and Violence in PostSuharto Indonesia on the mediation of the recent religiously-inflected conflict in the Moluccas, Indonesia, and a co-edited volume Images Without Borders for the School of Advanced Research Press.
