Biography
Ali Feser is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary artist. Her current book project, Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World, is an historical ethnography of Kodak film and its affective, aesthetic, and ecological aftereffects in Rochester, New York and throughout U.S. empire. She is developing a second project, A People’s Ethnography of Corporate Imperialism, that uses ethnographic theatre and community-based methods to compare the enduring influences of IBM, GE, and Kodak in upstate cities. In addition to writing for scholarly audiences, Feser also works in performance, installation, and photography.
Publications
- “Decay is a Woman: Kodak’s Tropical Research Lab and the Materiality of U.S. Imperialism.” In Film Stock: Histories, Technologies, Aesthetics, ed. Kirsty Doostar, Pansy Duncan, and Alice Lovejoy. University of Minnesota Press. (forthcoming)
- “Uncertain futures, doubled freedoms, and a defense of misreading Marx.” Visual Anthropology Review 41(2). (2026)
- “Fantasy Made Material: Kodachrome, Eugenics, and the Chemoaesthetics of Racial Capitalism.” In Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media, ed. Carolyn Kane and Lida Zeitlin-Wu. MIT Press (2025)
- “Was it worth it?” American Anthropologist 125(3):662-668. (2023)
- “The Photo is the Metadata.” In Metadata: Rethinking Photography from the Twenty-first Century. Scala Arts Publishers. (2022)
Education
- PhD, University of Chicago, Anthropology
- MA, University of Chicago, Anthropology
- BA, Bard College, Anthropology
Research Interests
- Visual and material culture
- Economic anthropology
- Gender and sexuality
- Industrial ecologies
- Multimodal ethnography
Teaching Interests
- Anthropology and media
- Medical anthropology
- Environmental anthropology and the critical study of toxicity
- Reproduction and the materiality of kinship