Page 283 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

268 Contributors

Lotte Hoek is lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
Her research interests include gender and sexuality, visual culture, cinema,
and popular culture in South Asia, especially Bangladesh. Her PhD disser-
tation Cut-Pieces: Obscenity and the Cinema in Bangladesh is an ethnogra-
phy of the Bangladesh film industry and focuses on the common practice
of inserting sexually explicit imagery into B-quality action movies.
Stephen Putnam Hughes completed both MA and PhD in Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he specialized
in media history and visual anthropology with special reference to cinema
in south India. He currently teaches Anthropology and Sociology at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he is
the Director of Studies for the MA program in the Anthropology of Media.
Having lived and worked in Tamil-speaking south India on and off over
the course of the past 22 years, he has published articles and chapters on
various topics related to media history.
Brian Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and
Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008), and a coeditor of
Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (California University Press,
2002). With Charles Hirschkind he coedited a special issue of the journal
Social Text on media and the politics of religion. His recent research is on
religion and media theory. He teaches at Barnard College, Columbia
University.
Carly Machado (PhD, 2006, Faculty of Social Science, University of the
State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) conducts research in the field of religion
and media, with a particular focus on new technologies, cyberculture, and
the contemporary religious imaginary, both in Brazil and in transnational
contexts. Her doctoral dissertation Imagine If It All Were True: The Raelian
Movement Among Truths, Fictions and Religions of Modernity dealt with the
Raelian Movement, a controversial new religious movement concerned
with questions about human cloning, bioethics, and the existence of extra-
terrestrials. Machado teaches at two universities in Rio de Janeiro: Estacio
de Sá University and Candido Mendes University. In 2007 she was a visit-
ing postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute on Globalization and the
Human Condition, McMaster University.
Birgit Meyer is professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of
Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU University Amsterdam. She has
conducted research on missions and local appropriations of Christianity,
Pentecostalism, popular culture and video-films in Ghana. Her publica-
tions include Translating the Devil. Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe
in Ghana (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Globalization and Identity.
Dialectics of Flow and Closure (edited with Peter Geschiere, Blackwell,