Search the faculty site
For media inquiries or to contact a faculty expert, please contact Media Relations:
Phone: 212.854.2037
Email: mediarelations@barnard.edu
Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
Brian Larkin
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Chair of the Department of Anthropology
Brian Larkin, associate professor of anthropology and chair of the department of anthropology, joined the faculty of Barnard in 1998. In addition to his teaching duties for the department of anthropology, Professor Larkin is affiliated with Barnard's Africana studies program.
Professor Brian Larkin's interest in media and society was first sparked when he took courses in American studies and cultural studies as an undergraduate student at the University of Birmingham in England. His doctoral studies were in the culture and media program at New York University's anthropology department.
Professor Larkin's research examines the ways in which media technologies shape secular and Muslim modernities in northern Nigeria. He is especially interested in the material culture of technologies and how these interact with local religious and social beliefs. He examines the imaginative worlds made available to Hausa youth by the circulation of transnational media flows—from Indian films to Islamic media—and the connections thus created within and between non-Western countries.
Professor Larkin’s research and teaching also examine ethnographic media such as film, television, and the World Wide Web.
Selected Publications
"Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy," Public Culture 16.2 (2004)
"Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos, Bollywood, and Global Media," in Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism, and Transnational Media, ed. E. Shohat and R. Stam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003)
Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, co-editor with F. Ginsburg and L. Abu-Lughod (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
"Materializing Culture: Cinema and the Creation of Social Space," in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
"Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria," Cahiers D'Études africaines 168 XLII-4 (2002)
"Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities," in The Anthropology of Globalization. A Reader, ed. J. X. Inda and R. Rosaldo (Oxford: Blackwell Books, 2002)
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the Department of Anthropology
Barnard College
212.854.5402
EDUCATION:
B.A., Birmingham University
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., New York University
RELATED LINKS:
Larkin's Columbia Anthropology page
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Media and society
Ethnographic media
Africana, African
Technology in culture