Courtney Handman
Associate Professor — Ph.D., University of Chicago
Department Associate Chair; Associate Professor

Contact
- E-mail: chandman@austin.utexas.edu
- Phone: 512-471-0059
- Office: WCP 4.124
- Campus Mail Code: C3200
Interests
Linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of Christianity, translation, religion and media, circulation, infrastructures, decolonization, Melanesia, Papua New Guinea, the Pacific
Biography
My earlier research was concerned with the social formations of Protestant Christianity, especially as these are organized around practices of language use and language ideologies. Although Protestant theology points toward an otherworldly individualism, I focus on the material and denominational configurations of Christians as the sites of contestation and moral ambivalence. Because language is one of the only kinds of "material" that Protestants recognize as important, I examine translation as a key process in the ongoing creation of Christian social formations. I have looked at the work of bible translators in Papua New Guinea, including both missionary translators from overseas and Papua New Guinean translators, and have worked with Guhu-Samane communities in the Waria River valley of Morobe Province, whose lives have been impacted by translation projects since the 1950s.
In my current research I focus on problems of circulation, especially as they structured colonization and decolonization in New Guinea. How were roads, airplanes, radio networks, and lingua francas all part of the same problem of managing the circulation of people, information, and goods in a landscape that was mostly known for being extremely rugged and linguistically diverse? In the post-World War II era, the decolonization of New Guinea was largely initiated by the United Nations, which tried to bring about independence in New Guinea through the careful management of information: eliciting information up from Australia and disseminating information down to New Guineans. New Guinea's decolonization was an important early moment in the development of the UN's model of global bureaucratic governance.