Lisa Cartwright

Known for her writing about visual culture and the body in feminist science and technology studies and working at the intersections of art and medical history and critical theory, Cartwright is the author of books including Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture and Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (co-author Marita Sturken). Recent essays consider the landscape photography of photographers including Catherine Opie, the history of film technology, and the visual cultures of viruses. A native New Yorker, Cartwright was trained in film and critical theory at the Whitney Program and at NYU Tisch School of the Arts before receiving her PhD in American Studies from Yale and joining the faculty at the University of Rochester, where she helped to launch the Ph.D. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. Cartwright is currently Professor of Visual Arts with additional appointments in the Department of Communication and the graduate Science Studies Program and an affiliation with the program in Critical Gender Studies. She directs the Catalyst Lab, an initiative that supports collaborations across art, science and technology with emphases in feminist and critical theory and in experimental documentary practice. The lab is home to the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience and supports collaboration with the FemTechNet, a international network of feminist scholars, artists, and teachers of technology, science, feminism, and digital media. 

Film and media studies, feminist and sexuality studies; disability studies; visual culture in science, health and medicine.

Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University (1991)

BFA in Film and Television, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (1982)

Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (1982)

Philadelphia College of Art (1977-79)

African Kaposi’s Sarcoma in the Light of Global AIDS: Antiblackness and Viral Visibility, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, co-authors Pawan Singh and Cristina Visperas, forthcoming. 

Visual Science Studies: Always Already Materialist. In Visualisation in the Age of Computerization, ed. Annamaria Carusi, Aud Sissel Hoel and Timothy Webmoor (Routledge 2014)

Topographies of Feeling: On Catherine Opie’s American Football Landscapes. In Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu (Duke 2014)

Catalog essay, Empathography I: Empathy in Art, ed. Christina Lammer (Löcker Verlag, 2013.)

How to Have Social Media in an Invisible Pandemic: Hepatitis C in the Time of H1N1. In Media Studies Futures, Volume 6, ed. Anghy Valdivia and Kelly A. Gates, (Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 215-240

The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleischer Apparatus, Body and Society 18(1), 47-78 (2012)

The Hands of the Projectionist, Science in Context 24(3), 443-64 (2011)

Practices of Looking, Second Edition (Oxford 2008)

Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Duke 2008)