Associate Professor of American Culture; College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
annawfis@umich.edu
Office Information:
3640 Haven Hall
Fields of study:
Digital studies, media theory, performance studies, contemporary art and visual culture, feminist and queer studies, critical theory
phone: 734.615.2936
Digital Studies;
Media Studies;
Critical Theory;
American Culture
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2012
About
Professor Fisher's research and teaching examine the theories, aesthetics, and politics of digital culture. Her work is particularly interested in how experimental artists and media interventionists have responded to the foreclosure of radical politics in recent decades.
She is currently completing her book manuscript, which theorizes parasitism as an ambivalent mode of resistance in 21st-century art and politics. Taken up as a performative maneuver, the parasite figures a symptomatic response to the perceived impasses of political action. The book explores how, in a neoliberal moment in which social life is increasingly treated as an imposition on the liberal-capitalist state, a new generation of digital and performance artists have ‘played’ parasitism as a mode of subversive passing—a compromised and complicit imaginary forged by the system itself.
She is the co-editor, with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, of the 2nd edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015).
She is also a founding member of the Precarity Lab research collective based at the University of Michigan.
Research Areas(s)
- digital network culture
- critical theory
- radical art and media
- feminist and queer theory
- performance studies
Affiliation(s)
- Faculty: Department of American Culture (AC), Digital Studies (DS)
- Faculty: The Residential College, Arts and Ideas in the Humanities
