Professor William Mazzarella

William Mazzarella is the Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

He is the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke, 2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Duke, 2013), and The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, 2017). He is the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana, 2009), and the co-author, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, of Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (Chicago, 2020). He is also the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (Poetrywala, 2016). Dr Mazzarella is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Mad Men of Bombay: A Story of Magic Found and Lost.

Dr Mazzarella will be accompanied at Clare Hall by his partner, Dr Amy Leia McLachlan. Dr McLachlan is a medical and environmental anthropologist, and researcher at the Field Museum. Her current book project is The World for Now: Curing and Cosmopoesis in a Migrant Amazon, considers the ethics of world-making under conditions of perpetual impossibility.