PROFESSOR JONATHAN CRARY
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ON THE ENDS OF SLEEP: REFLECTIONS
IN THE GLARE OF A 24/7 WORLD
Jonathan Crary received his Ph.D. from Columbia 1987 having previously graduated with a B.A. from Columbia College, where he was an art history major. Among his professors were Edward Said, Meyer Schapiro, F.W. Dupee and Lucien Goldmann. He also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he majored in film/photography. His film teachers there included James Broughton, Larry Jordan and Gunvor Nelson. His first teaching position was in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. He has taught full-time at Columbia since 1989, and has also been a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard.
He has written widely on contemporary art and culture for publications including Art in America, Artforum, October, Assemblage, Cahiers du cinéma, Film Comment, Grey Room, Domus, and Village Voice. He has also written critical essays for over 25 exhibition catalogs. In 1986 he was one of the founders (and continues to be co-editor) of Zone Books, a press now internationally noted for its publications in intellectual history, art theory, politics, anthropology and philosophy, including texts by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Caroline Bynum, Leo Steinberg, Erwin Panofsky and many others. Professor Crary was co-editor of the 1992 volume Incorporations (Zone Books) which assembled a broad range of reflections on the problem of the body in contemporary technological culture.
He is the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990) which has been translated into eight foreign languages. With this book he began his extended study on the origins of modern visual culture, which he continues to develop in his current research. His book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture was published in 2000 and was the winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.
