About

Lisa Cartwright is a Professor of Visual Arts and the Director of the Practice Concentration in the Art History, Theory and Criticism PhD Program at UC San Diego. She works across visual culture studies and feminist science and technology studies. She is appointed in Communication and Science Studies and is affiliated with the Design Lab and Critical Gender Studies. Cartwright is an alumnx of the Whitney Independent Study Program and NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale. Her academic career includes faculty and fellowship appointments at the University of Rochester, Ruhr University, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and Brown. Her research and publications focus on visual culture, medicine's visual culture, and moral spectatorship. She is a founding member of the International Association of Visual Culture and the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Additionally, she is leading a multiyear research and curatorial project on oceanography in collaboration with Nan Renner of the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, as part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time 2024 Art + Science initiative.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Sociology
• History
• Social psychology
• Law
• Immunology
• Medicine
• Biology
• Geography
• Microbiology

Selected publications

• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography
  • History
  DOI

• Index

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2023-10-17

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring Roles of the Polysaccharide Capsule in Pathogenesis of Hypervirulent Acinetobacter baumannii Clinical Isolate Lac-4

  Antibiotics · 2023 · 11 citations

  • Microbiology
  • Biology
  • Medicine

  mutant was highly attenuated in murine sepsis and unable to disseminate from the lungs during pneumonia. This study reinforces the capsule as a key contributor to Ab Lac-4 hypervirulence.

  DOI

• Images of ‘‘Waiting Children’’: Spectatorship and Pity in the Representation of the Global Social Orphan in the 1990s

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  DOI

• Index

  2008-01-01

  paratextOpen access

  and art 303, 304 conversion to Christianity 91, 100, 101 and creation of Memorial Day 107 and culture of sentiment 50 and "culture of uplift" 273 exclusion of experience of, from memory of American Civil War 112-14, 119 fi lm representation of 346-7 formation of distinctive cultural presence 348 images of in popular culture 346 and mass culture 194, 363 and material culture 303-4 music and dance 205, 206, 209, 226-7 performance and protest 318-19 and popular culture 364 and racism 430 and radio 367 religion and Protestantism 90-2, 388-9 and theater 55-6, 194, 319 women writers and American

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Moral Spectatorship

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2008 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

  Why were theories of affect, intersubjectivity, and object relations bypassed in favor of a Lacanian linguistically oriented psychoanalysis in feminist film theory in the 1980s and 1990s? In Moral Spectatorship, Lisa Cartwright rethinks the politics of spectatorship in film studies. Returning to impasses reached in late-twentieth-century psychoanalytic film theory, she focuses attention on theories of affect and object relations seldom addressed during that period. Cartwright offers a new theory of spectatorship and the human subject that takes into account intersubjective and affective relationships and technologies facilitating human agency. Seeking to expand concepts of representation beyond the visual, she develops her theory through interpretations of two contexts in which adult caregivers help bring children to voice. She considers several social-problem melodramas about deaf and nonverbal girls and young women, including Johnny Belinda, The Miracle Worker, and Children of a Lesser God. Cartwright also analyzes the controversies surrounding facilitated communication, a technological practice in which caregivers help children with communication disorders achieve "voice" through writing facilitated by computers. This practice has inspired contempt among professionals and lay people who charge that the facilitator can manipulate the child's speech.For more than two decades, film theory has been dominated by a model of identification tacitly based on the idea of feeling what the other feels or of imagining oneself to be the other. Building on the theories of affect and identification developed by André Green, Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott, and Silvan Tomkins, Cartwright develops a model of spectatorship that takes into account and provides a way of critically analyzing the dynamics of a different kind of identification, one that is empathetic and highly intersubjective

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pawan Kumar Singh

  37 shared

• Michael Szalay

  University of California, Irvine

  36 shared

• Siddhartha Dasgupta

  The Asiatic Society of Mumbai

  36 shared

• Nina Gupta

  New York University

  36 shared

• Kara Keeling

  New York University

  36 shared

• Michael Renov

  New York University

  36 shared

• Sharmishta Roy

  New York University

  36 shared

• Priya Jaikumar

  University of Delhi

  36 shared

Labs

• Visual ArtsPI