Eduardo Cadava

Title
Philip Mayhew Professor of English
Office Phone
Office
21 McCosh Hall
Office Hours

Wednesdays from 11:00am - 1:00pm, and by appointment

Bio/Description

Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English, and an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He also serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in Media and Modernity, the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Program in Jazz Studies. He has been Professor of Philosophy in the summer program at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, the Benjamin Menschel Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at Cooper Union, a Professor in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and a Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Athens. He was the Head of Wilson College from 2009 – 2017, and the curator of the Wilson College Signature Lecture Series. He specializes in American literature and culture, comparative literature, media technologies, literary and political theory, theory of translation, and issues of citizenship and human rights. He has written extensively on literature, philosophy, photography, architecture, music, democracy, war, memory and forgetting, race and slavery, human rights and citizenship, and the ethics of decision. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton UP), Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford UP), and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits (Steidl). His two most recent books are Paper Graveyards (link is external), published by MIT Press in 2021 and the recipient of the College Art Association’s 2023 Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, and Politically Red, co-authored with Sara Nadal-Melsió, to be published by MIT Press in the fall of 2023. He also has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject? (Routledge), Cities Without Citizens (The Slought Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum), a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights (Duke UP), and The Itinerant Languages of Photography (Princeton University Art Museum and Yale UP). He is the President of the Executive Board of the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and he has co-curated installations and exhibitions at the Slought Foundation, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum, and he has co-produced and co-edited a DVD entitled Unpacking Derrida's Library (Slought Foundation and PIIRS), with recorded remarks by Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Hent de Vries, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Samuel Weber. He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot, and has introduced and co-translated Nadar's memoirs, Quand j'étais photographe, which appeared with MIT Press in 2015 under the title When I Was a Photographer. A collection of his essays on photography appeared in Spanish under the title La imagen en ruinas in Santiago, Chile in 2015. He is presently working on a small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing entitled Music on Bones, a monograph on Fazal Sheikh’s The Erasure Trilogy, and a collaboration with the Catalonian photographer Joan Fontcuberta on the forensic photographic work of the French police photographer Alphonse Bertillon. He is also co-directing, with Eyal Weizman, a multiyear project on the relation between political conflict and climate change entitled Conflict Shorelines that includes field work in Amazonia, the Negev desert, and the Arctic, and collaborating with Fazal Sheikh on a project entitled Exposure that seeks to document the ruination of the Utah landscape by uranium mining and oil and gas drilling and the consequences of this ruination on native communities. He received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2018 and, in the summer of 2019, he was awarded honorary Greek citizenship for “promoting Greek culture abroad.”