Rosalind Morris focuses her fieldwork in two main areas: South Africa and mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. Her earlier work focused on the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development, particularly in the encounter between old and new forms of mediation. More recently, she has been working on an ethnography of South Africa’s mining communities. Traversing these fields of inquiry, her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence; the aesthetic constitution of the political; the sexualization of power and desire; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her writings on all of these issues, she attends specifically to the matter of representation. Her publications include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, the archive of visual anthropology, the history of photography in Asia, and the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa. Other essays have addressed the history of fetishism, the violence of culture in anthropological theory, translation and power, mediatic war, photography and its discontents, sex, gender and sexuality, and art in South Africa. She is a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture.

Representative Publications:

1994. New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (Boulder: Westview Press).

1995. “ALL MADE UP: ‘ALL MADE UP: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 24:567-92.

2000. In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand (Durham: Duke University Press).

2004. ‘Intimacy and Corruption in Thailand’s Age of Transparency,’ in Off Stage, On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, edited by Andrew Shryock. Stanford: Stanford University, pp.225-43.

2005. ‘Fetishism: Overview’. In New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Vol II, Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp.822-826.

2006 ‘The Mute and the Unspeakable: Political Subjectivity, Violent Crime, and ‘the Sexual Thing’ in a South African Mining Community,’ for Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, edited by Jean and John Comaroff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.57-101.

2007 ‘Imperial Pastoral: The politics and aesthetics of translation in British Malaya,’ in Representations, Special Issue on ‘Transpacific Modernisms,’ edited by Colleen Lye, Volume 99 (Summer): 159-93.

2007 ‘Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 36:355-89.

2007 ‘The War Drive: Image Files Corrupted,’ Social Text, Special Issue on War, edited by Patrick Deer. 91:103-42.

2008 ‘Giving up Ghosts.’ Positions, Spring 2008, pp.209-37.

2008 ‘The Miner’s Ear,’ Transition 98 (2008): 96-115

2008 ‘Rush/Panic/Rush: Speculations on the Value of Life and Death in South Africa’s Age of Epidemic,’ Public Culture. 20:2 (2008):199-231.

2008 ‘Witchcraft,’ Social Text 95 (2008):113-33.

2009. Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia. Rosalind C. Morris, (Ed.) Durham: Duke University Press.