Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, Paper Graveyards, and, with Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red. He has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography and, with Liana Theodoratou, has translated Nadar’s memoir, When I Was a Photographer. He has curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum, the Slought Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum.
His Old Dominion Research Professorship will support a book on Fazal Sheikh’s three-volume photobook, The Erasure Trilogy. Entitled Erasures, it will be the first book-length examination of this project. Erasures is divided into three chapters, “Stones and Ruins,” “Deserts and Trees,” and “Faces and Mirrors,” each of which is organized around one of The Erasure Trilogy’s three parts. Erasures continues my decades long effort to create a training manual for reading images historically. In this context, the book explores the relations between loss and survival, memory and forgetting, the past and the present, and the dead and the living. He will explore the ways in which images and words, photographs and texts, expose, record, archivize, work against, and sometimes conceal histories of violence and dispossession. Sheikh’s trilogy engages the stakes of photography and history by generating sites of memory in which the past is brought to bear on the present in order to articulate the conditions for a politics of mourning that also would be a politics of the future. Taking its point of departure from these sites, Erasures reimagines the concepts of life, the human, rights, and justice, all of which belong to contemporary art’s insistence on engaging the world in which we live.
Read his full biography on the English Department website.
