Benjamin Williams
Ph.D. Student
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Area of Study
PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies
Bio
My research focuses on 20th and 21st-century media, visual culture, and literature in the Americas with attention to conceptions of race, mobility, and the law. My dissertation, “Mediating Documentation: Race, Affective Governance, and the US/Mexico Border,” traces representations of legal documents, migration, and surveillance cultures in the borderlands. By analyzing documentary films, photography, television series, and art installations, I consider how these media self-reflexively bolster or call into question state documentation practices.
Education
- B.A. in Philosophy, University of Texas at El Paso
- M.A. in English and American Literature, University of Texas at El Paso
Research
Media, Critical Border Studies, Migration, Visual Culture
Publications
- “His Eyes Disappear”: (Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot
ASAP/Journal, vol. 8 no. 1, 2023, p. 93-118. doi:10.1353/asa.2023.0004. - “Who Is Kin to Me?”: Textual and Textural Intimacies in Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh's Human Archipelago
Cultural Critique, vol. 119, 2023, p. 167-194. doi:10.1353/cul.2023.0017.