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 documentary media’s representations of migration and surveillance cultures in
the borderlands. I analyze documentary forms such as film, photography, and television series that self-reflexively bolster or call into question state processes of documentation.
Research Keywords: Media, Critical Border Studies, Migration, Visual Culture
Education
- B.A. in Philosophy, University of Texas at El Paso
- M.A. in English and American Literature, University of Texas at El Paso
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.