Nicholas Mirzoeff

Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual culture scholar in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture.

His many publications that have developed the field of visual culture include: The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011), which won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013; How To See The World, which has been translated into 10 languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015; and The Appearance of Black Lives Matter, which was published in 2017 as a free e-book, and again in 2018 as a limited edition print book with the art by Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope.

Since the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Mirzoeff has played an active role in the movement to take down statues commemorating white supremacy and colonialism.

Mirzoeff will give the keynote lecture “Whiteness: What is to Be Done?”, to conclude the IARI 2019 Colloquium and open the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities 2019 national conference.