Chad Elias
Associate Professor
Appointments
Associate Professor of Art History
Area of Expertise
Contemporary Art,
Representations of war in lens-based media,
Artificial intelligence and machine vision,
Digital heritage and 3D printing,
Visual cultures of the Anthropocene,
Environmental Humanities,
Animal Studies,
Petrocultures of the Middle East
Biography
My first book, Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon, was published by Duke University Press in 2018. Reviews of Posthumous Images have appeared in Arab Studies Quarterly, Art Journal, Art Papers, the Journal of Arabic Literature, Object and Third Text. In collaboration with the Hood Museum, I organized a multidisciplinary symposium which explored questions relating to resource extraction, carbon imaginaries, species extinction and evocations of the deep past and worlds-to-come in contemporary art. My ongoing book project explores how contemporary artists critically interact with artificial intelligence systems, with a particular focus on the implications arising from the automation of cognitive and social processes inherent to human visual perception.
Education
PhD Northwestern University
Publications
"Video Archives of the Syrian Revolution: A Media Experiment." Visual Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2024): 74–91.
"Akram Zaatari: The Social Life of Photographs," in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, ed. Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler (London: Thames & Hudson, 2024).
"Islam and the Middle East in the United States: Claire Beckett's Simulating Iraq and The Converts." American Art 37, no. 3 (2023): 72–95.
"Between Species: Animal-Human Collaboration in Contemporary Art," Burlington Contemporary 2 (November 2019): n.p. http://[http://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/journal/journal/between-species-animal-human-collaboration-in-contemporary-art]
"Whose Digital Heritage? Contemporary Art, 3D Printing, and the Limits of Cultural Property," Third Text 159, Vol 33, Issue 4 (July 2019): 687-707.
"The Preservation Complex: A Dialogue with Chad Elias." Future Anterior 15, no. 1 (Summer 2018): 59-64.
"Emergency Cinema and the Dignified Image: Cell Phone Activism and Filmmaking in Syria," Film Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2017): 18-31. (peer reviewed). Article nominated by B. Ruby Rich for the Katherine Singer Kovács award for outstanding scholarship in cinema and media studies.
Contact