Thomas Keenan

Thomas Keenan teaches Media Theory, Comparative Literature, and Human Rights at Bard College New York, where he heads the Human Rights Project and also helped to create the first undergraduate programme in Human Rights in the United States. He is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Human Rights and codirector of International Justice Watch, an online discussion forum on human rights, war crimes, and genocide. He has written numerous books, notable amongst which are Fables of Responsibility (Stanford University Press, 1997), an essay where he reflects on different ethical-political concepts like responsibility, rights, freedom, equality, and justice. With Eyal Weizman, he co-authored Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (2012 – in Spanish, La calavera de Mengele. El advenimiento de una estética forense, Sans Soleil, 2015), a forensic approach to understanding war crimes. He also coedited, with Wendy Chun, New Media, Old Media (2006), which explores the old and the new in digital culture. In the domain of exhibitions, he co-curated (with Carles Guerra) the exhibition “Antiphotojournalism” in Barcelona and Amsterdam (2010), and later participated in the exhibition “Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics” (MACBA, 2017).