Debashree Mukherjee Awarded 2025 ACLS Fellowship
Awards Recognize Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences Research
We are proud to announce that Debashree Mukherjee has been awarded a 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
After four years of restricting ACLS Fellowships to early-career scholars due to the impact of COVID-19, the 2024 competition was re-opened to scholars across all career stages. Professor Mukherjee has been recognized as one of 62 outstanding scholars from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.
Mukherjee’s research project, Tropical Machines, explores nineteenth-century media experiments in penal colonies and sugar islands such as the Andamans, Mauritius, and Fiji, to argue that the machines that are considered emblematic of Western modernity were in fact forged in the “dark” tropics.
“ACLS is grateful that we are in a position to continue to fund this vital research that advances our understanding of human societies and cultures,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Representing many different fields of study—including African diaspora studies, art history, English, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and more—this year’s fellows demonstrate the importance of foundational humanistic inquiry in helping us to understand a wide range of questions concerning our collective and varied histories, narratives, creations, and beliefs.”
The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.
Extractive Media to Co-Sponsor Event with the South Asia Institute at Columbia
The Extractive Media Working Group at CSSD will be co-sponsoring Camera South Asia II alongside the South Asia Institute as they return this year to host a conversation that takes an expansive view of South Asia and its diasporic geographies. Our renowned roster artists, curators, and scholars probe the relation between aesthetics and politics, migration and memory, be it in post-1990s India or the 19th century oceanic voyages of the subcontinent’s “old diaspora.” Camera South Asia seeks to balance a focus on the contemporary with a long view of the past and to unsettle easy ascriptions of identity or authenticity, be it for individuals or for images.
Read Now! New Blog Post, titled "Extraction, Waste, and Security," following Extractive Media's Event on March 4
Click here to access Extractive Media’s latest blog post follow their March 4 seminar with scholars Eleanor Johnson and Jonah Rowen.
Plate 1, “The Colonial House,” from Carl Bernhard Wadström, An Essay on Colonization (1794).
For information on the past event itself, you can access the original event page here.
Matthew Engelke to Become Columbia's New Department of Religion Chair
After six years directing the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL), Professor Matthew Engelke is set to assume the role of Chair for the Department of Religion at Columbia. As an Extractive Media fellow and long-time affiliate of CSSD, we congratulate Professor Engelke on this wonderful achievement.
To read more on Engelke’s plans for the department and his own work, follow this link to read the entire Columbia News interview.
RECAP: Extraction Time with Professor Brian R. Jacobson (1/25/24)
On January 25th, the Extractive Media Working Group gathered for a seminar with Caltech Professor of Visual Culture Brian R. Jacobson, who shared a draft of a chapter from his forthcoming book on the historical relationship between art and the oil industry.
Barnard Professor of Anthropology Brian Larkin offered a response to the piece, which was followed by lively discussion amongst the faculty and graduate students in attendance.
The Extractive Media WG Releases its Spring 2024 Events Lists
The Extractive Media Working Group has released its Spring 2024 Events Flyer listing its upcoming programming for the semester.
Follow this link to see upcoming events at CSSD.
Recap: Extractive Media hosts Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris on Nov. 15
On Wednesday, November 15, the Extractive Media working group hosted Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris, the Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, for a conversation on her new essay "Un-Earthing Extractive Architectures," which was recently published in e-flux Architecture.
The event was followed by a dinner at Lido in Harlem.
For the original Events page for this seminar, follow this link.
In attendance at dinner, from L to R: Extractive Media co-chair Debashree Mukherjee, Professor Reinhold Martin, Professor Jane Gaines, Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris, PhD student Cecília Resende Santos, Extractive Media graduate coordinator Hannah Pivo, Extractive Media co-chair Zeynep Çelik Alexander.
CSSD Member Joins Over 100 University Professors in Criticizing "Principles of Solidarity. A Statement" Signed by Jürgen Habermas and Others
Extractive Media working group member and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia, Rosalind C. Morris, joined over a hundred university faculty from around the world in criticizing and condemning the November 13 statement on the Israel-Gaza War published on the website of the Normative Orders research center at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther and Jürgen Habermas are among the signatories of the original statement.
For more on this story, read here.
Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander to Delivery Lecture at e-flux Tonight Entitled "Paper Beats Rock: The Imperial Institute's Media"
e-flux Architecture presents a lecture with Extractive Media working group co-director Zeynep Çelik Alexander entitled “Paper Beats Rock: The Imperial Institute’s Media,” at e-flux on Thursday, November 16 at 7pm.
Follow the registration link below for more information from the e-flux Architecture Lecture series webpage.
Scarcity Colloquium with Carl Wennerlind
Extractive Media held a colloquium April 5, 2023 with Professor Wennerlind, where he introduced and discussed his forthcoming book, co-authored with Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2023).
“What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” Colloquium with Jennifer Wenzel
The Extractive Media working group met on 8 March 2023 with Professor Wenzel. She led the group in a discussion of some recent work on extractivism, both her own recent article co-authored with Imre Szeman and selection from Stephanie LeMenanger's 2013 book Living Oil.
Jennifer Wenzel and Imre Szerman, "What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?" Textual Practice 35, no. 3 (2021): 505-523.
Stephanie LeMenanger, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford University Press, 2013).