Uzma Z. Rizvi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Brooklyn, where she teaches anthropology, ancient urbanism, critical heritage studies, memory and war/trauma studies and the postcolonial critique. She often finds herself trying to balance the very ancient with the very contemporary, both mediated by material things. An avid collector of experiences and thoughts, Rizvi travels extensively and utilizes those life experiences to inform her research about past societies. She loves teaching her students to critically interrogate their own subjective experiences and to take stock of how it might affect their own practices. The crux of all of her endeavors is a disciplinary one, that is, how to understand what it means to be human, and she employs interdisciplinary methods to get at different kinds of answers, in some manner reflecting the many forms of experiences that might exist in the world today. Currently she is writing about crafting resonance in the ancient world, and is contending with the global heritage of epistemic laziness.
Since receiving her doctorate from the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania in 2007, Rizvi has been Faculty Fellow and Chair for the Initiative on Art, Community Development and Social Change at the Pratt Center (2007-2008; 2010-2011) and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Introduction to Humanities program at Stanford University (2008-2009). Rizvi’s commitment to cultural production has provided her with opportunity to work with many artists from the South Asian and Middle Eastern Diaspora in the US. She has also directed the documentary ‘Telling Stories, Constructing Narratives: Gender Equity in Archaeology’ (2007). She has served in an advisory board capacity to various academic and cultural institutions, the Queens Museum of Art, South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC – board member 2007-2010) and South Asian Theater Arts Movement (SATAM).
A longtime resident of Brooklyn, she loves walking to work, and lives with her young daughter and husband. Their house is covered with books and shoes.
Select Publications
2014 (section editor, with L. Weiss and W. Londono), Political and Social Archaeology, Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer.
2013 (editor, with S.Abraham, P.Gullapalli, & T. Raczek) Connections and Complexity: New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
2013 Checkpoints as Gendered Spaces: An autoarchaeology of War, Heritage and the City, in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, edited by P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison, and A. Piccini, pp. 494-506. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2013 Creating Prehistory and Protohistory: Constructing Otherness and Politics of Contemporary Indigenous Populations in India, in The Death of Prehistory, edited by P. Schmidt and S. Mrozowski. Pp. 141-157. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2012 Ingesting the Material from Ganeshwar to Karbala: Reconstituting the Analytic and Recognizing Centrifugality in Archaeological Theory. Archaeologies. Volume 8, Number 1: 77-84.
2011 Subjectivity and Spatiality in Indus Urban Forms: Mohenjo-Daro, the Body, and the Domestication of Waste, in The Archaeology of Politics: the Materiality of Political Practice and Action in the Past, edited by Peter G. Johansen and Andrew M. Bauer, pp. 221-244. Cambridge Scholars Press.
2010 Indices of Interaction: Comparisons between the Ahar-Banas and Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex, in EASAA 2007: Special Session on Gilund Excavations, edited by T. Raczek and V. Shinde, pp. 51-61. British Archaeological Reports: ArchaeoPress.
2010 (editor, with Jane Lydon) World Archaeological Congress Research Handbook on Postcolonial Archaeology, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
2008 Decolonizing Methodologies as Strategies of Practice: Operationalizing the Postcolonial Critique in the Archaeology of Rajasthan, in Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, M. Liebmann and U. Rizvi (eds.), p. 109-127. Archaeology and Society Series, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
2008 (editor, with Matthew Liebmann) Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
2006 Accounting for Multiple Desires: Decolonizing Methodologies, Archaeology and the Public Interest, India Review, Vol. 5 (3-4):394-416.
http://pratt.academia.edu/UzmaRizvi
Twitter Handle: @UzmaZRizvi
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