Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr David L Martin

Academic qualifications

B.A. (Hons) Politics and Fine Arts, University of Melbourne
Ph.D. (University of Melbourne)

Teaching

MA in Art & Politics (group project)

Politics of Other Cultures (1^st year)

Theories of International Relations II - Views from the South (2^nd Year, second term)

The Politics of Vision (coming soon…)

Other Positions

Managing Editor, Postcolonial Studies (Taylor & Francis)

Email: pcs@netspace.net.au

Website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cpcs

Research interests

Art and Politics

Counter-Mapping

Postcolonial Theory

Politics of vision, space and bodies

Theories and critiques of modernity

I am a committed interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in the fields of politics, art history, postcolonial theory, cultural geography, medical humanities and the history of religion. Far from distracted wanderings, these interdisciplinary concerns coalesce sharply around questions of politics and vision. In particular I am concerned with the embodied nature of vision in the formation of agency, how art, landscape and the body interact in subject formation, and how, through genealogies of vision, we can arrive at far-reaching critiques of the so-called rationality of Western modernity.

I am particularly interested in the notion of counter-mapping both as a metaphor for decolonizing knowledge formations, as well as literally in terms of new ways of conceiving and representing space which disrupt the normalizing effects of systems of power/knowledge. More than just an effort to put back what the map erases, I am interested in how counter-mapping can be an attempt to reconfigure the political through/against representation, and how this encounters and evolves through processes of the everyday.

Selected publications

Martin, D. L. Curious Visions of Modernity: enchantment, magic, and the sacred, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011

Martin, D. L. “Of Monuments and Masks: historiography in the time of curiosity’s ruin”, Postcolonial Studies, vol.10, no. 3, September, 2007.

Martin, D. L.  “A Monument to the Magic of Modernity”, Left Curve, no. 31, 2007.