Deborah Levitt

My work focuses on sites of conjugation of media and rhetorics of life, from classical tableau vivants to medical films of the 20s and 30s to forms and practices of animation.  I am interested in how new media technologies have dovetailed with the development of biopolitical logics, from the Enlightenment to the present day, as well as in the manner in which the sometimes eccentric sites at which cultural definitions of life are in fact generated may help us think “life” beyond the narrowly scientific paradigms which structure contemporary political programs.  Current publications include a book chapter on Giorgio Agamben’s work on media and biopolitics, and another on forms of artificial life in Mamoru Oshii’s anime feature, Innocence (2004).  I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School.