Brian Larkin

Director of Graduate Studies; Professor of Anthropology (Barnard College)

Email: bl190@columbia.edu

Media technologies; Nigeria; Visual and Sound Cultures; Memory; Museum and the Archive; Morality and Ethics; Science and its Discontents; Placemaking

Brian Larkin examines media technologies and the way they shape broader ecologies from forms of political rule, to the constitution of urban spaces, and religious and cultural life. He analyzes the actual operations of infrastructures and how they come to constitute the worlds within which we live. He has published on breakdown and disrepair, piracy, the global circulation of cultural forms, infrastructure and urban space, sound studies, and Nigerian film (Nollywood).

Larkin is the cofounder of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia.