Dr Stefan Tarnowski

I am a sociocultural anthropologist working across the disciplinary traditions of media studies, political theory, and postcolonial studies. Alongside my Early-Career Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen on the ‘Views of Violence’ project. 

My ethnographic fieldwork has focussed on media activism in the 2011 Syrian uprising and subsequent war. In particular, I look at the relationship between activism and the more authoritative fields of journalism, humanitarianism, law, and cinema. 

I’m an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Asian and Middle East Studies, and Centre for Film and Screen. At Cambridge, I’ve taught on courses including the Anthropology of the Middle East; the Anthropology of Islam; Theory and Method in Middle East Studies; History, Time and Memory; and Arab Cinema.

My book manuscript based on my doctoral thesis, provisionally titled Epistemic Murk: Media Activism, Revolution, and War in Syria, is about configurations of media technology, knowledge, and power during Syria’s uprising and war. The war in Syria was the best documented in history, with many more hours of footage than hours of conflict; and yet it was marked by a pervasive sense that one couldn’t really know what was happening. Rather than disabling politics, my ethnographic fieldwork explores how this “epistemic murk” has been a productive force in the Syrian uprising, war, and aftermath. Each of the six chapters of my book follows how activists or assorted experts attempted to find different social and technical solutions to the problem of doubt and uncertainty.

My postdoctoral research, funded by an Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) Sapere Aude Grant at the University of Copenhagen, as part of ‘Views of Violence: Images as Affective, Documentary and Evidentiary’ builds on my doctoral research by looking at the role and use of open-source content in various legal processes. Since routes to The Hague have been blocked for Syria, I have been following trials against Syrian state actors in various European courts with universal jurisdiction legislation, including France, Sweden, the UK, and Germany. By examining how different courts use different kinds of image – e.g. footage produced by activists, reports by journalists, or photographs by state bureaucracies – I examine the claim that new media technologies are driving a paradigm shift away from the so-called ‘era of the witness’ towards more ‘material’ forms of evidence.

I’m British, Lebanese and Polish and grew up mainly in Lebanon and the UK, apart from a few early childhood years spent in Poland. I received my BA from the University of Oxford in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Islamic History). I then moved back to Lebanon where I worked as a contemporary art curator and critic. I received a doctorate from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology in October 2022, with additional certificates from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Center for Comparative Media. 

My research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Weber Stiftung, and the Arab Council for Social Sciences amongst others. My writing has recently appeared in Visual Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Review of Middle East Studies, World Records, Film Quarterly, and London Review of Books. I’ve also worked as a researcher, subtitler, and translator for a number of artists and filmmakers.