Courtney Handman
· Associate ProfessorUniversity of Texas at Austin · Anthropology
Active 2007–2026
About
Courtney Handman is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic expertise spans linguistic anthropology, with particular interests in AI, translation, religion and media, and the anthropology of Christianity. Her research also explores circulation, infrastructures, decolonization, and the cultural dynamics of Melanesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Pacific region. Through her work, she investigates how language, religion, and media intersect within these contexts, contributing to broader understandings of cultural and social processes in these areas.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Theology
- Religious studies
- Environmental science
- Philosophy
- Anthropology
- History
Selected publications
Response: The Starting Points for <i>Circulations</i>
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology · 2026-03-06
article1st authorCorrespondingAnimal translations: AI and the intelligibility of non‐human worlds
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · 2026-04-14
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAmid the general sense of worry that large language models will soon drown out human voices, some researchers are optimistic that machine learning will allow humans to listen to and understand animal voices to an unprecedented extent. As part of a broader project aimed at interspecies communication, a loosely connected set of animal behaviourists, AI engineers, and public‐facing animal advocates are working to comprehend ‘animal languages’ and thus to improve the lives of domesticated and wild species. Work in this field not only assumes a novel set of speakers (which can include, for some, plant as well as animal species), but it also contributes to a redefinition of what language is. This article examines how the expansion of language to non‐human animals is helping to produce posthuman worlds in which linguistic expertise is partially transferred from humans to machines. These new ways of defining language are especially visible in the forms of translation that people in the world of interspecies communication engage in that link animals, humans, and artificial intelligence. Repeating earlier moments in translation history, a new kind of linguistic expertise makes a new kind of translation possible.
2026-01-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract It is difficult to separate out linguistic from other approaches to the anthropological study of religion, since in some senses the study of religion has been organized by what might expansively be called linguistic approaches all along. The first half of this chapter examines some of the ways in which linguistic approaches (or linguistically derived models) have been used, focusing in particular on the theories of performance in ritual as well as on the cluster of work that emphasizes the role of linguistic or semiotic ideologies. In the second half of this chapter, linguistic approaches are contrasted to those focusing on affect and phenomenology, especially those that aim to bring to the fore seemingly nonlinguistic forms. It is argued that, at least as concerns the study of religion, any approach has to be paired with linguistic enunciations of moral orders, however partial they may end up being.
Ritual, Media, and the Here-and-Now of Decolonization
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23 · 9 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter contextualizes international demands for the self-government of former colonies, and addresses calls for decolonization after World War II in Papua New Guinea. In the 1950s, United Nations delegates began making novel ritual and bureaucratic utterances to call for self-government for colonial subjects, including a demand in 1956 that Australia start to move toward the independence of the Territory of New Guinea. Outraged, the Australian government and many in the Australian public argued against near-term independence. Delegitimizing the efficacy of the UN demand required a different contravening ritual event of constructed simultaneity that juxtaposed the primitivism of Papua New Guineans with UN demands for autonomy. The reporting in Australian tabloids of the May River Massacre offered a perfect opportunity. This chapter counterposes the UN’s demand for self-government with media coverage of this massacre to examine how simultaneity was used to delegitimate the ritual event of calling for decolonization.
The chatbot's real self: On the archaeology of artificial personas
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology · 2025-12-26 · 2 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract From the beginning of widespread public interactions with ChatGPT and other large language models, some users have seen the disfluencies of chatbots as opportunities for them to go on an archaeological search for an unfettered chatbot persona that they need to jailbreak. These are not claims of sentience, but rather of personhood. Moreover, they are part of a right‐leaning populist political project of defining speech that some find inflammatory, racist, or sexist as instead normal and needed for humans to be, like the jailbreaked chatbots, unfettered subjects.
2025-04-29
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLuminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
Telepathy Tales: Tok Pisin, Communist Radio, and Other Channels of Illegitimate Circulation
2025-04-29
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLuminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
Remote Networks: Airplanes, Radios, and the Making of Communicative Distance in Lutheran New Guinea
2025-04-29
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLuminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
2025-04-29
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLuminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
2025-04-29
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLuminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
Frequent coauthors
- 65 shared
Maya Mayblin
- 65 shared
James S. Bielo
- 64 shared
Paul Anderson
Liverpool John Moores University
- 64 shared
Timothy Jen- Kins
University of London
- 64 shared
Edith Szanto
University College London
- 64 shared
Sune Haugbølle
Roskilde University
- 64 shared
Martin Holbraad
- 64 shared
Astrid Krabbe Trolle
University of Copenhagen
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