Craig Campbell
Associate Professor — Ph.D., University of Alberta

Contact
- E-mail: craig.campbell@utexas.edu
- Phone: (512) 232-4342
- Office: WCP 4.122
- Campus Mail Code: C3200
Interests
Visual/intermedia/sensory ethnography, Soviet culture, Evenki peoples, travel and mobility, cultural history, archives, photography; Siberia
Biography
2016-2016 Fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
Fascinations
My research has most recently been concerned with the realm of ethnographic and documentary images. The research and visual experiments that I undertake explore the possibility for failed, defaced, degraded, manipulated, and damaged photographs to activate interpretive fields typically unacknowledged in conventional ethnographies and histories. This intermedia and aesthetic approach pushes the sensuousness of the world back into an intellectual and scholarly understanding of it. This work necessarily involves careful attention to archives and archival theory.
Ethnographic and regional interests: Siberia, Central Siberia, Indigenous Siberians, Evenki, Evenkiia, Reindeer hunting and herding, Travel and mobility, location and place, Socialist colonialism, early forms of Sovietization.
For more information about my projects, publications, and other activities please visit my website:
I am the director of the Intermedia Workshop, a laboratory of visual and sensory ethnography.
Courses
ANT 325J • The Photographic Image
32485 • Fall 2021
Meets M 2:00PM-4:00PM WCP 4.120
EII
ANT 324L • Indig People: Rus And Ussr-Wb
32069 • Spring 2021
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:30PM
Internet; Synchronous
GC
ANT 394M • Critical Media Practices-Wb
32260 • Spring 2021
Meets W 2:00PM-5:00PM
Internet; Synchronous
ANT 305 • Expressive Culture-Wb
30965-30975 • Fall 2020
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:00PM
Internet; Synchronous
SB
ANT 325Q • Practices Of Looking-Wb
31140 • Fall 2020
Meets MW 2:30PM-4:00PM
Internet; Synchronous
ANT F325J • The Photographic Image
78544 • Summer 2020
Meets MTWTHF 2:30PM-4:00PM
Two-way Interactive Video
EII
ANT 325J • The Photographic Image
31155 • Fall 2019
Meets M 2:00PM-4:00PM WCP 4.120
EII
ANT 394M • Critical Media Practices
31318 • Fall 2019
Meets F 9:00AM-12:00PM WCP 4.120
ANT 325J • The Photographic Image
31698 • Spring 2019
Meets T 2:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 325L • Practices Of Looking
31760 • Fall 2018
Meets MW 2:30PM-4:00PM SAC 4.118
ANT 394M • Critical Media Practices
31935 • Fall 2018
Meets F 9:00AM-12:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 305 • Expressive Culture
30700-30715 • Spring 2018
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:00PM CLA 0.112
SB
ANT 325J • The Photographic Image
30845-30850 • Spring 2018
Meets T 12:00PM-2:00PM SAC 5.118
ANT 325L • Practices Of Looking
31508 • Fall 2017
Meets MW 2:30PM-4:00PM SAC 4.118
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
31665 • Fall 2017
Meets F 9:00AM-12:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 305 • Expressive Culture
31200 • Spring 2017
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:30PM CLA 0.112
SB
ANT 325J • The Photographic Image
31325-31330 • Spring 2017
Meets TTH 12:30PM-1:30PM SAC 4.118
ANT 325L • Cultures And Ecologies
31290 • Fall 2016
Meets F 1:00PM-4:00PM CLA 1.108
(also listed as REE 345)
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
31485 • Fall 2016
Meets W 1:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 305 • Expressive Culture
30575 • Spring 2015
Meets TTH 9:30AM-11:00AM UTC 3.124
ANT 325J • The Photographic Image
31525-31530 • Fall 2014
Meets T 3:30PM-5:30PM SAC 4.118
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
31720 • Fall 2014
Meets M 1:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 305 • Expressive Culture
31555 • Spring 2014
Meets MWF 1:00PM-2:00PM CLA 0.112
SB
ANT 394M • Intermedia And Aesthetics
31955 • Spring 2014
Meets T 1:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 325L • The Photographic Image
31415-31425 • Fall 2013
Meets T 3:30PM-5:00PM SAC 4.118
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
31650 • Fall 2013
Meets M 1:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 325L • Practices Of Looking
31300 • Spring 2013
Meets TTH 3:30PM-5:00PM CLA 1.106
ANT 394M • Intermedia And Aesthetics
31535 • Spring 2013
Meets M 1:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 325L • The Photographic Image
31205-31215 • Fall 2012
Meets T 3:30PM-5:30PM SAC 4.174
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
31415 • Fall 2012
Meets M 1:00PM-4:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 394M • Intermedia And Aesthetics
31225 • Fall 2011
Meets T 9:00AM-12:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT S325L • Traveling Culture
81965 • Summer 2011
Meets MTWTH 1:00PM-3:00PM SAC 4.118
(also listed as REE S325)
ANT 325L • Practices Of Looking
31360 • Spring 2011
Meets TH 3:30PM-5:00PM SAC 5.102
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
31545 • Spring 2011
Meets M 3:00PM-6:00PM SAC 4.120
ANT 325L • The Photographic Image
30170 • Fall 2010
Meets TTH 3:30PM-5:00PM CBA 4.348
ANT 394M • Intermedia And Aesthetics
30385 • Fall 2010
Meets W 9:00AM-12:00PM EPS 1.130KA
ANT 394M • Archive And Ephemera
30640 • Spring 2010
Meets M 3:00PM-6:00PM EPS 1.128
ANT 325L • The Photographic Image
30492 • Fall 2009
Meets TTH 3:30PM-5:00PM BEN 1.102
Ethnographic Terminalia
In the Autumn of 2009 I began working with some colleagues on a project I called Ethnographic Terminalia. The idea behind it was to create an initiative that would help promote intellectual and practical conversations between ethnography, cultural and historical research and contemporary art. We wanted to raise the profile of unconventional and experimental visual anthropology beyond the purvue of museums and cinemas. Since 2009 we have held annual exhibitions and featured dozens of experimental works in research-based art.
You can read more about our project and explore past exhibitions on our website:
Image: Scene from our 2012 exhibition in San Francisco (Audible Observatories)
Books
Agitating Images
Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia
In Agitating Images, Craig Campbell draws a rich and unsettling cultural portrait of the encounter between indigenous Siberians and Russian communists and reveals how photographs from this period complicate our understanding of this history. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how photographs go against accepted premises of Soviet Siberia and dissects our very understanding of the production of historical knowledge.
"The archival turn has had a sobering effect on recent attempts to grapple with the histories of photography but for the best studies––like Craig Campbell’s––the archive itself is part of the historical problem: its internal mechanisms, its effects of power, its production of truth and its techniques of forgetting and erasure––all effects that, as Campbell shows in this highly original work of excavation and disruption, can never be entirely secured against the arbitrariness and disfunction of the archival machine and the troubling liability of archival photographs to slip and slide out of place."
— John Tagg, Binghamton University