Lebenslauf | Aktuelles Projekt | Publikationen
Forschungsinteresse(n):
Reparationen; Kriegstraumata; Bilder und Affekte; Intermedialität
Forschungsgebiet(e)
Europa und der Mittelmeerraum
Profile
Hélène Quiniou is a cultural anthropologist and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation.
In 2023, she earned her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University (New York). Her first monograph, Postcolonial Trauma: A Revised History of the Present, develops an epistemological framework of relationality to examine the aftereffects of colonialism not only “far afield” but also at the diasporic “centre”. It weaves together ethnographic fieldwork at the trials of the 2015 terrorist attacks in France and original archival research on 1950s conceptions of the sociogenesis of war neuroses to uncover reparation as a dynamic process of community-making.
Her second book project focuses on the new role of images and affects in trials for terrorism. Drawing from art historical debates on the intermediality of text and image, she argues that shifting media technologies have important effects on the complex participatory practices through which images are produced and given meaning inside and outside the courtroom.
Why Law and Anthropology?
Located squarely at the intersection of Law and Anthropology, my work is concerned with the phenomenon of legal innovation. I regard the intersection between these fields as a two-way process. On one side, I draw from social theory and ethnographic methods to shed light on how newness is brought into the world through legal processes and instruments. On the other side, what counts as evidence in the courtroom is itself in the middle of a tremendous transformation. Thus, I am also interested in how new media technologies are reshaping the contours of the legal craft.