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Matti Bunzl

Anthropology
Germanic Languages and Literatures
Gender and Women's Studies
Professor of History
Jewish Culture and Society
Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian

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Education

Ph.D. University of Chicago

Biography

Matti Bunzl specializes in the modern culture and history of Austria and Germany, with particular research interests in Jewish history, the history of gender and sexuality, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory. Additional interests include the history of anthropology, historical ethnography, and the intersection of history, literature, and culture. Bunzl recently completed the book Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). He is also the co-editor of Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000 - with Daphne Berdahl and Martha Lampland) and Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003 - with Glenn Penny). Bunzl's current research is in the history of anthropology with a special focus on Franz Boas and the connections between 19th-century German and 20th-century American anthropology. Matti Bunzl received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1998. He teaches courses on the history of anthropology and the history and culture of modern Jewry. He is also the director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

Publications

Books

  • Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago Press, 2007.
  • Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Book Contributions

  • "Queering Austria for the New Europe." Sexuality in Austria. Ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dagmar Herzog. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007. 131-144.
  • "Chasers." Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. Ed. Don Kulick and Anne Meneley. New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, 2005. 199-210.
  • "Völkerpsychologie and German-Jewish Emancipation." Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ed. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 47-85.
  • "Foreword to Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other/ Syntheses of a Critical Anthropology." Introduction. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
  • "The Prague Experience: Gay Male Sex Tourism and the Neo-Colonial Invention of an Embodied Border." Altering States: Ethnographies of the Transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Ed. Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl, and Martha Lampland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 70-95.
  • "Theodor Herzl's Zionism as Gendered Discourse." Theodor Herzl and the Origins of Zionism. Ed. Edward Timms and Ritchie Robertson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. 74-86.
  • "Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture." Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Ed. George Stocking. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. 17-78.

Edited Books

  • Bunzl, Matti. Daphne Berdahl, On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
  • Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
  • Penny, Glenn, and Matti Bunzl. Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
  • Berdahl, Daphne, Matti Bunzl, and Martha Lampland. Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Journal Articles

  • "The Quest for Anthropological Relevance: Borgesian Maps and Epistemological Pitfalls." American Anthropologist 110.1 (2008): 53-60.
  • "Desiderata for a History of Austrian Sexualities." Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 48-57.
  • "Anti-Islamophobia and Its Others." European Studies Forum 37.1 (2007): 10-13.
  • "Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe ." American Ethnologist 32.4 (2005): 499-508.
  • "Anthropology Beyond Crisis: Toward an Intellectual History of the Extended Present." Anthropology and Humanism 30.2 (2005): 187-195.
  • "Boas, Foucault, and the ‘Native Anthropologist’: Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology." American Anthropologist 106.3 (2004): 435-442.
  • "Of Holograms and Storage Areas: Modernity and Postmodernity at Vienna’s Jewish Museum." Cultural Anthropology 18.4 (2003): 435-468.
  • "Austrian Zionism and the Jews of the New Europe." Jewish Social Studies 9.2 (2003): 154-173.
  • Bunzl , Matti . "Boas, foucault and the "native anthropologist": Notes toward a neo-boasian anthropology." American Anthropologist 106.3 (2003): 435-442.
  • Bunzl , Matti . "Of holograms and storage areas: Modernity and postmodernity at vienna's jewish museum." Cultural Anthropology 18.4 (2003): 435-468.
  • "Inverted Appellation and Discursive Gender Insubordination: An Austrian Case Study in Gay Male Conversation." Discourse & Society 11.2 (2000): 207-236.
  • "Political Inscription, Artistic Reflection: A Recontextualization of Contemporary Viennese-Jewish Literature." The German Quarterly 73.2 (2000): 163-170.
  • "Resistive Play: Sports and the Emergence of Jewish Visibility in Contemporary Vienna." Journal of Sport & Social Issues 24.3 (2000): 232-250.
  • "Outing as Performance/ Outing as Resistance: A Queer Reading of Austrian (Homo)Sexualities." Cultural Anthropology 12.1 (1997): 129-151.
  • "The City and the Self: Narratives of Spatial Belonging among Austrian Jews." City & Society (1996): 50-81.
  • "The Poetics of Politics and the Politics of Poetics: Richard Beer-Hofmann and Theodor Herzl Reconsidered." The German Quarterly 69.3 (1996): 277-304.
  • "On the Politics and Semantics of Austrian Memory: Vienna's Monument against War and Fascism." History and Memory 7.2 (1995): 7-40.