Zitzewitz, Karin
(Ph.D. Columbia University, 2006)
Assistant Professor
zitzewit@msu.edu

KARIN ZITZEWITZ is a new faculty member in Anthropology and Art and Art History at Michigan State University who assumed her position in January, 2009. She recently completed work as Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago on a Harper-Schmidt fellowship where she spent two years. Dr. Zitzewitz is a cultural anthropologist (PhD Columbia University, 2006) who works in India. Her dissertation was entitled ?The Aesthetics of Secularism: Modernist Art and Visual Culture in India.? In her research, which concerns the social place of art in post-colonial India, she takes an anthropological approach to the questions of aesthetic value that are usually central to art history. She is revising her dissertation into a book that addresses the ethical projects of modernist artists in India, particularly their relationship to the political ideology of secularism. Her work is truly interdisciplinary, and has attracted attention of both anthropologists and art historians. The sub-discipline of South Asian art history is in a period of rapid transformation. Other anthropologists of colonial and post-colonial art have moved over into art history positions in an effort to link the field to currents in Western art history. At Chicago, she taught a core course in social theory, which combined political economy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, to first and second year college students. She went to the University of Chicago after having taught for two years in the more wide-ranging core course at Columbia University. At Michigan State University, this spring semester (2009) Dr. Zitzewitz is teaching Anthropology 491 (001): Culture and Politics in India. Dr. Zitzewitz has a sincere interest in undergraduate teaching. Beyond similar interdisciplinary foundational courses, her teaching interests also include visual culture, South Asian Studies, and the subfields of the anthropology of art, religion, and modernity.

Full CV

A few recent publications include:

• “The Moral Economy of the Street: The Bombay Paintings of Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan,” forthcoming in Third Text, 2009.
• “The Secular Icon: Secularist Practice and Indian Visual Culture,” Visual Anthropology Review, 24:1 (Spring 2008), 12-28. Revised version to be reprinted in Alev Cinar, Srirupa Roy, and Maha Yahya, eds. Secular Publicities: Visual Practices of Secularism and Religion in the Middle East and South Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), forthcoming
• “Women at Work: Grace and Labour in Post-Independence Painting and Photography,” Art India, 8:3 (July 2003), 64-66.
• “On Signature and Citizenship: Further Notes on the Husain Affair,” Towards A New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, Shivaji K. Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Deeptha Achar, eds., (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, Ltd., 2003), 276-287.