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Associate Professor of Anthropology, Religious Studies
Ph.D. Chicago 1989.
Email:
Personal Homepage: http://www.angelazito.com/
Research Interests: Cultural history/historical anthropology; critical theories of religion; religions of China; religion and media; history and anthropology of embodiment; performance and subjectivity.
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.
Selected Works:
"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 July 2009 2008 was a year devoted to my work in and on China. For six months, I lived in a Beijing community as part of Redgate Gallery’s artists’ residency program, working on several projects. The first, The Stiletto Project, was a performance piece produced on July 1 at the The Shangrila Art Commune/Feijia cun featuring a pair of black stiletto shoes whose heels were carved with tiny seals, worn by my collaborator, model Chen Juanhong, on a 19th c. scholar’s desk. The second project deals with the production of art by local citizens in public spaces: I joined 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. Finally, I produced a photographic installation with Sun Lijun called “Dogs and People” featuring life-sized portraits of neighbors and dogs, installed in the propaganda windows in the local sub-district. This collaborative work in Beijing forms the basis for an overarching ethnographic project tentatively entitled “Seeking Significance: Finding yourself in public in Beijing.”
These activities allow 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, very much on display in the run-up to the Olympics. (Photoblog from last summer: http://angelazito.posterous.com/ )
At NYU, I co-curated the fourth biennial Reel China Documentary Film Festival with Professor Zhang Zhen, sponsored by the Center for Religion and Media and her department of Cinema Studies. In October 2008 we showed 17 films, hosting three filmmakers, three film scholars, and a curator, all from Beijing. We partnered with the REC Foundation of Shanghai for this festival—visit their website at http://www.reelchina.net/. For NYU festival program details scroll down at http://www.nyu.edu/fas/center/religionandmedia/?menu=events&sub=screeningsRoundtables
Work on education and incarceration continued with a workshop in March 2009 at CRM, “Devoted to discipline: religion, education and punishment in prison.” It featured a screening of The Dhamma Brothers: East Meets West in the Deep South and a discussion with its filmmaker and others exploring the paradoxes of discipline as religion, college education and punishment in American prisons. At the University of Michigan’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies I gave an invited talk in their “Topographies of Violence” series, “Re-reading Foucault from a Distance: Discipline and the Person in China.” This research conjoins my longstanding interest in embodied personhood in early modern and modern China, and a commitment to incarceration studies.
The year saw publication of two essays theorizing the nexus of religion and media: “Culture” in Keywords for Media, Religion, and Culture. Edited by David Morgan (Routledge: 2008) and “Can television mediate religious experience?: The theology of Joan of Arcadia” in Religion, Beyond the Concept, edited by Hent DeVries (Fordham University Press, 2008). And an essay, “Secularizing the pain of footbinding: Missionary and medical stagings of the universal body,” in Secularisms, edited by J. Jakobsen and A. Pellegrini (Duke 2008). Please visit my website http://www.angelazito.com/
I remain committed to the study of religion at NYU through my joint appointment in the Religious Studies Program. http://religiousstudies.fas.nyu.edu/page/home. As a member of the Anthropology Department, I encourage students interested in religion to join us for either an undergraduate course or the graduate seminar, “Theories and Methods for the Study of Religion,” which I will teach in fall 2009. We all look forward to another year of exciting public programming at the Center, lectures in our department, and, of course, teaching and research!
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