Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College

Faculty Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory

Associate Faculty in the University of Chicago Divinity School

PhD, University of California Berkeley, 2000


William T.S. Mazzarella writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, critical theory, affect and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, ritual and theopolitics, and the occult shadow of the modern. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke, 2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Duke, 2013), The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, 2017), and, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (Chicago, 2020). He is also the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana, 2009), and the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (Poetrywala, 2016). His article 'The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement' appears in the 2019 issue of Annual Review of Anthropology. A short 2022 essay on the politics of charisma in the age of Trumpism is here. For a sampling of Dr Mazzarella’s publications, please visit his academia.edu profile.


Contact Information

Office: Haskell 213
Phone: (773) 834-4873
Email: mazzarel@uchicago.edu
Website