Timothy Cooper is an anthropologist of ethics and comparative media. His research sits at the interface between visual culture, sound studies, and the digital humanities.
His regional focus is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, where his work is driven by a set of interrelated questions: What shapes public understandings of ethical life? How do media infrastructures foster relations across different religious and moral communities? What happens to core concepts in the digital, sonic, and moving-image arts when lived or interpreted through post-secular or theological frameworks?
His first ethnographic project and book Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace was conducted in a large electronics market in the Pakistani city of Lahore. This research investigated varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan’s Muslim-majority public. It brings together the anthropology of religion with insights from contemporary media studies that account for how environmental forms can store, transmit, and transform knowledge. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, the book won the 2022 Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion and has been described as a ground-breaking intervention in media studies of the global South. Other publications from this project include articles on the epistemic decolonizing of film exhibition, religious ontologies of moving image media, and data migration. Several public outputs also followed, including three ethnographic films screened at film festivals and exhibited in galleries around the world, and the curation of a landmark film retrospective at the British Film Institute.
Timothy’s second ethnographic project and next book project, Live Mourning: The Arts and Ethics of Islamic Videography aims to rethink the relationship between theology and media theory. It documents how Pakistan's largest religious minority established an immersive style of videography in the face of violent persecution. This research follows the establishment of digital videography collectives among Shi‘a Muslims and their commitment to publicizing acts of commemorative mourning for figures in early Islamic history. Publications from this project range from interventions in the study of death in the digital age, the threshold qualities of amplified sound, and a reappraisal of the role of narratology in visual anthropology. Public outputs from this research include a multiplatform film and sound essay and the donation of a representative collection of objects to a major anthropological museum.
In 2023, Timothy began a new ethnographic project entitled Intermittent Connections. Based in the Karakorum Mountain Range of Central Asia, it studies what forms of assembly and collectivity arise in the discontinuity of internet provision. Based primarily in the Gojal Valley, it examines how state anxiety about this constitutionally ambiguous region of Pakistan means that villages are granted only a few hours of intermittent internet and electricity supply per day. To what do digital collectives reliant on stable communication connections – such as heritage, data migration, or creative practice – aspire without the infrastructural means of storage or access? Activities emerging as part of this research include a collaborative project studying the disjuncture of the present as a temporal frame and a co-founded digital archive of Wakhi-language sound and video recordings, with seed-funding provided by the Silk Roads Programme at King’s College, Cambridge and the ESRC Social Sciences Impact Fund.
Timothy is passionate about widening the frame of anthropological thought and practice to include new ways of doing critique. As Reviews Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, he introduced two new sections for the first time in the journal’s history that invite the inclusion of non-English scholarship and multimodal outputs. He has been the editor of Camthropod: The Cambridge Anthropology Podcast for several years, commissioned dozens of new episodes, and held regular workshops advocating for a sound essay form unique to anthropological analysis.
Since completing a PhD in Anthropology at University College London, Timothy has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and at the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. Since 2020, he has taught courses on ethical life and the anthropology of the subject; the anthropology of Islam; the anthropology of digital, auditory and visual worlds; circulation and breakdown; public culture in South Asia; introduction to ethnographic film; and film and faith, and supervised many postgraduate dissertation ethnographies.
His research has been funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies. He was a Digital Stories Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and has most recently been an Early Career Fellow funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Isaac Newton Trust.
