Marisa Karyl Franz

Clinical Associate Professor

Biography

Dr. Marisa Karyl Franz is a Clinical Associate Professor in museum studies at NYU. She works in the areas of intellectual history and religious studies with particular attention to nineteenth-century museums and the history of ethnography in the Arctic and Subarctic. Marisa’s work focuses on religious and magical materials in collections, local and community museums, and narratives of precarity and apocalypse. Her manuscript, Near and Desired Things: Desiderata and the Collection of Siberian Shamanic Materials for Local Museums, 1880-1910, examines how local Siberian museums were collecting and classifying shamanic materials in late Imperial Russia to consider Siberian identity, histories of exile, and the systems of ordering and desiring knowledge. Her new research is examining issues around the preservation of things that are intended to decay, to be destroyed, or to die—these include ritual objects, human remains, and ice.

Education

Ph.D. 2019 (Religious Studies), University of Toronto; M.A. 2013 (Religion), University of Chicago; B.A. 2010 (Religion and Philosophy), Bryn Mawr College.

Areas of Research/Interest

Material Religion and Magic; Ethnographic Collection History; Heritage Studies; Intellectual History; Colonial History; Religious Studies; Indigenous Studies; Russian and Siberian History; Preservation and Decay; Arctic Studies.

External Affiliations

- American Academy of Religion

- Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

- Jordan Centre for the Advanced Study of Russia

- American Museum of Natural History

Publications

“‘Rather Poor and Threadbare’: Scratching-Woman, Bogoras, and the Intimacy of Material” The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600–Present, eds. Matthew P. Romaniello, Alison K. Smith, and Tricia Starks. Bloomsbury Academic Press: 2021.

“A Visitor’s Guide to Shamans: The Kunstkamera’s Russian and Asian Ethnographic Collections in the Late Imperial Era” Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies 19, no. 1 (2020): 41–56.