Areas of Research/Interest

Cultural history/historical anthropology; critical theories of religion; religions of China; religion and media; history and anthropology of embodiment; performance and subjectivity.

Affiliated with other departments or programs

Co-director of the Center for Religion and Media
http://www.nyu.edu/fas/center/religionandmedia/
Religious Studies Program
http://religiousstudies.as.nyu.edu/page/home/

External Affiliations

Association for Asian Studies, China and Inner Asia Council; American Academy of Religion, section on Critical Theories and Discourses of Religion; American Anthropological Association; American Ethnological Society.

Fellowships/Honors

The Pew Charitable Trusts grant for $3 million to co-found with Faye Ginsburg the Center for Religion and Media at NYU in 2003; Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation post-doctoral fellowship, 1997; Gladys Brookes Teaching Award, Barnard College, 1995; National Endowment for the Humanities summer 1994; National Academy of Sciences – National Committee for Communication with the People's Republic of China post-doctoral fellowship, 1991-92; Social Science Research Foundation grant 1980-82; Committee for Communication with the People's Republic of China, advanced study award 1979-80.

Publications

"Can television mediate religious experience? The theology of Joan of Arcadia" in Religion: Beyond the Concept, edited by Hent deVries, Fordham University Press, 2007.

"Secularizing the pain of foot-binding in China: Missionary and medical stagings of the universal body" in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75.1 (March 2007): 1-24.

"Things Chinese" and "This is not a façade" in Making Things Public, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Wiebel.  (Catalogue for exhibit in the ZKM Center for Art and Media of Karlsruhe, Germany, 2005.)

"Bound to be represented: theorizing/fetishizing footbinding," in Modernity Incarnate: Refiguring Body Politics in China, eds. Larissa Macfarquhar and Fran Martin. University of Hawaii, 2006.

"Purchasing parents in 17th century China” (Zai chiqi shiji Zhongguo mai fumu). In Ming Qing qingyu (Sentiments and Desires in Ming-Qing China), Academi Sinica, Taiwan, 2004.

Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Body, Subject and Power in China, co-edited with Tani Barlow. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Current News / Projects
Updated September 2010

2009-10 saw me back in Beijing for more collaborative work on an ethnographic project tentatively entitled “Seeking Significance: Finding yourself in public in Beijing.”
  I am interested in how people to transmute time “spent” into forms of social and personal value while simultaneously creating public space as they take up new activities together.  In this way I hope to conjoin some newly emergent senses of the individual with equally new senses of the possibilities of being together with others.  The question of access to the means of cultural production in public is a fascinating one in flux right now in this post-reform era. Various collaborations over the past few years have explored the production of art by local citizens in public spaces. They include a neighborhood  photography installation, a performance piece about stiletto shoes and feminine beauty with a  fashion house and my work with a community of students studying calligraphy with two teachers in a public park, writing in water on pavement using large sponge-tipped brushes.  This beautiful disappearing “Writing in Water” is the subject of a collaborative documentary now (finally!) in rough-cut. The Beijing fieldwork  places the body and its mediations at the center of its theoretical commitments, continuing this theme as the grounding of my intellectual life. For more on this research and for my papers, visit my website at http://www.angelazito.com/

Yet another aspect of public cultural life that I have been researching is Chinese independent documentary film. In May 2009 I was invited to serve as  a jury-member at the Seventh Documentary Film Festival in Beijing—we are partnering with Fanhall Cinema for this year’s 5th Reel China Documentary Film Biennial, which I co-curate with Professor Zhang Zhen of Cinema Studies. Professor Zhang and I are teaching a graduate course entitled “Ethical Direction: New Chinese Documentary Film” this fall with the help of an NYU Humanities Initiative grant for co-teaching. The film festival will provide opportunities for our students to see new work and meet filmmakers from China as well.

I remain committed to the study of religion at NYU through my joint appointment in the Religious Studies Program, where I am Acting Director. http://religiousstudies.fas.nyu.edu/page/home.  And also as I continue to co-direct (with Faye Ginsburg) the Center for Religion and Media at NYU—visit our website to find our fall 2010 programming.   http://crm.as.nyu.edu/page/home   In March 2010, I organized at the Center a conference on “Digital Religion: Transforming Knowledge and Practice” thanks to a Luce Foundation grant.  http://crm.as.nyu.edu/object/crm.projects.digitalreligion We plan on opening further research into this area at the Center. Summer 2009 took me also to Kunming in Yunnan for the 16th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethological Sciences (ICAES) where I  organized a  panel on Religion and Media in China, and presented a paper on “Religion as Media: Cultural Dimensions.”

As a member of the Anthropology Department, I encourage students interested in religion to join me and my colleagues in Relgious Studies  for either an undergraduate course or the graduate seminar, “Theories and Methods for the Study of Religion,” which I will teach in fall 2010.  We all look forward to another year of exciting public programming at the Center, lectures in our department and, of course, teaching and research!