Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Jennifer Bajorek

Biographical information
PhD, Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine; MA, Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine; BA, English Literature, Princeton University. Before coming to Goldsmiths, Dr Bajorek taught in the Rhetoric Department of the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar.

Teaching

Convenor, MA programme in Cultural Studies; teaches the module on “Text and Image” and lectures in the module on “Methods of Cultural Analysis” (both compulsory for students doing the MA in Cultural Studies).

Dr Bajorek welcomes applications from research students working on topics in comparative literature, French and Francophone literature, poetry, philosophy, photography and photography theory, critical and social theory (particularly Marxism or post-Marxism), and on projects taking a philosophical approach to any area of visual culture.

Research interests

Dr Bajorek has written and published on a broad range of topics in the areas of literature and philosophy, text and image, and critical and social theory, emphasizing questions at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. She has also translated several works of contemporary French philosophy, including those by Sarah Kofman, Bernard Stiegler, and Jacques Derrida, and she has co-edited and co-translated (with Eric Trudel and Charlotte Mandell) a volume of the ethnographic, literary theoretical, and political writings of Jean Paulhan.

Her current research is on photography and photography theory, with a geographic focus on West Africa. She is particularly interested in practices and conceptions of photography that go beyond the image or the field of the visual, and in the different modes and qualities of collective memory connected with different technologies and material supports. In a series of linked writing and teaching projects, she is exploring the significance of non-European photographic traditions for our understanding of the aesthetic and technical dimensions of political phenomena such as nationalism and democracy. Other projects in this domain include collaborative research on archives and visual publics with scholars, photographers, and institutions in the US, the UK, and Senegal.

Selected publications

Books

Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. (Single-authored.)

Jean Paulhan on Poetry and Politics. Ed. Jennifer Bajorek. Intro. Jennifer Bajorek and Eric Trudel. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Charlotte Mandell, and Eric Trudel. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 2008. (Edition, introduction, and translation.)

Essays on literature and philosophy

‘Insert into Blankness: Poetry and Cultural Memory in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Interpretation’. Qui Parle (Spring/Summer 2007): 97-130. [PDF]

‘The Offices of Homeland Security, or, Hölderlin’s Terrorism’. Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 874-902. [PDF]

Essays on photography

‘(Dis)locating Freedom: The Photographic Portraiture of Seydou Keïta’. Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art and Visual Culture. No. 3/4. Special double issue on ‘Interrogating African Modernity’, edited by Sylvester Ogbechie and John Peffer (Spring 2009): 89-103.

‘Flat Gazes, Uneven Geographies: Guy Tillim’s Jo’burg’. Representation and Spatial Practices in Urban South Africa. Johannesburg: Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 2008. 159-166. [PDF]

‘Holding Fast to Ruins: The Air War in Brecht’s Kriegsfibel’. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, eds. Bombs Away: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 97-111. [PDF]

Jennifer Bajorek’s cv [PDF]

Digital image archives and photography-related resources
http://angelo-micheli.blogspot.com/
http://www.archivalplatform.org/
http://www.fai.org.lb/CurrentSite/index.htm
http://www.imagesetmemoires.com/index2.html
http://www.pro2m.net/fotoafrica/article.php3?id_article=1
http://www.mundus.ac.uk/
http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/digital.html
http://www.pierreverger.org/fpv/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=176
http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/photographs.html

Africa-related resources
http://www.aachron.com/
http://www.aachron.com/editions/critical_interventions/index.php
http://album.aufeminin.com/album/see_170102_20/SAINT-LOUIS.html#p14
http://www.archivesdusenegal.gouv.sn/biblio.html
http://www.auf.org/regions/afrique-ouest/
http://www.codesria.org/Publications.htm#Journals%20Online
http://epa-prema.net/
http://www.fondationzinsounews.org/Site/Accueil.html
http://www.sephis.org/htm/publications.htm
http://www.universityofafricanart.org/press.html