Patrick Anderson

Patrick Anderson works at the interstices of performance studies and cultural studies, focusing in particular on the constitutive role of violence, mortality, and pain in the production and experience of political subjectivity. Anderson has worked as a director and actor in theater and film; as an anthropologist in Sri Lanka, Chicago, and New Mexico; and as an activist and organizer for anti-war groups in Sri Lanka, for the Berkeley Free Clinic in California, and for HIV/AIDS groups in various locations in the United States. He is Associate Professor in the departments of Communication, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Duke UP, 2010), Autobiography of a Disease (Routledge, 2017; winner of the ICQI Book Award and finalist for the Many Voices Prize), and Empathy’s Others (forthcoming); the co-editor, with Jisha Menon, of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave, 2009); and the author, interviewer, or co-author of numerous essays and book chapters in journals and anthologies. Anderson serves on the editorial boards of Women and Performance and Cultural Studies, and is the co-editor, with Nicholas Ridout, of the “Performance Works” book series at Northwestern University Press.