Lecturer, Anthropology
MA Convenor, Visual Anthropology
Goldsmiths, University of London
Lee Douglas
Visuality, Vision, & Science; Memory, History, & the Production of Knowledge in Post-violence Contexts; Archives & Cultures of Documentation; Evidence & the Social Production of Truth; Post-colonialism & Race in Portugal & Spain; Bureaucracy & Paper Shuffling; Economic Austerity & Political Change in Southern Europe; Intellectual Property & Cultural Heritage; Museum Collections & Display
Lee Douglas is a visual anthropologist, curator, and filmmaker and a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also convenes the MA in Visual Anthropology. Combining ethnographic research and multimodal media production, she unpacks how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through collective and individual engagements with the traces of political violence, displacement, and decolonization in Spain, Portugal, and the Iberian Atlantic.
She was the Head Researcher for the project “Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories” (MSCA-IF-2019-895197) which analyzed individual and collective uses of the material and visual traces left by entangled historical events: the Carnation Revolution that marked an end to Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship; the conclusion of the Portuguese imperial project; and the return migrations sparked by these events. Prior to my work in Portugal, she was an Associate Lecturer in anthropology and visual culture at New York University-Madrid and a Research Fellow in the Collections Department at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
She is the Co-Editor in Chief of Visual Anthropology Review, a member of the Writing with Light Editorial Collective, and a Working Group Leader for the TRACTS Cost Action Network.
As a scholar, educator, and practitioner, she is committed to forms of collaborative visual research capable of mobilizing anthropological research findings across disciplines and borders. In this spirit, she has undertaken multimodal media projects to elucidate how the past bears on the present through diverse visual forms.
2020 “The Things They Carried: A Gendered Rereading of Photographs of Displacement During the Spanish Civil War” (with María Rosón), 21 Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 459-483.
2019 “Combatting Absence: Forensic Science & the Politics of Identification from a Global Perspective.” Cartografía de la desaparición forzada en Colombia, Paco Gómez Nadal, Ed. Heinrich Böll Stiftung. [Spanish]
2017 “Bones, Documents, & DNA: Cultural Property at the Margins of the Law.” Cultural Property (Companion Series), Jane Anderson & Haidy Geismar, Eds. Routledge Press.
2016 “Corresponding from Exile. The Social Lives of Family Photographs of Exiles from Ciudad Real” (with Jorge Moreno Andrés). Pasados de violencia política: Memoria, discurso y puesta en escena, Anexo Editorial. [Spanish]
2015 “The Arts of Recognition,” 7 Anthropology Now 76-93.
2014 “Mass Graves Gone Missing: Producing Knowledge in a World of Absence,” Special Issue: Violence and the Politics of Memory in a Global Context. Culture & History 3(2), http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2014.022.
2013 Chile From Within (ebook). Susan Meiselas, ed. London, Mapp Editions, co-producer & researcher. [Spanish & English]
2013 “The Evidentiary Regimes of Science & Sight: Forensic Science and the Exhumation of the Past.” Human Rights/Copy Rights: Visual Archives in the Age of Declassification. Cristián Gómez-Moya, Ed. Santiago, University of Chile Press. [Spanish & English]
FILMS
2021 Mirándonos de frente (working title), co-director and producer of documentary film about the Carnation Revolution, militant cinema and the Spanish Transition, in production.
2015 What Remains, Co-director & producer
Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER)
World Premiere: Margaret Mead Film Festival, 2015