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Recommended Reading
Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press, 2008.
—. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.
—. “The Cinematic Milieu: Technical Evolution, Digital Infrastructure, and Urban Space.” Public Culture 33, no. 3 (2021): 313–348.

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2025/2026
Brian Larkin, PhD
Professor of Anthropology
Barnard College, Columbia University
Born in 1964 in London
PhD in Anthropology, New York University
Arbeitsvorhaben
The Media System of Empire
In 1839 the British Colonial Office received 902 pieces of correspondence from its far-flung territories. By 1909 this number rose to 90,000, and by 1939 it passed 300,000. Empire is the extension of political power and administration across racial, linguistic, and cultural difference. In the case of the British Empire that power depended upon a communicative infrastructure of files, memos, minutes, dispatches, and other documents which enacted the practical work of drawing disparate territories into a single system. As the size and complexity of empire grew, British imperialists had to innovate new forms of storing and circulating information. My book project examines the infrastructures, protocols, circulatory forms, and storage mechanisms by which information was moved and stored at different points in British imperial history. Cumulatively, these changes formatted the civil service for a modern era of information, one that undergirded empire as an organizational system. I examine the material infrastructures of imperial information systems. This is what I term the media system of Empire.Recommended Reading
Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press, 2008.
—. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.
—. “The Cinematic Milieu: Technical Evolution, Digital Infrastructure, and Urban Space.” Public Culture 33, no. 3 (2021): 313–348.
Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek
Larkin, Brian (Durham, NC, 2021)
The cinematic milieu : technological evolution, digital infrastructure, and urban space