Department of Anthropology

Education:

Ph.D. 2015 Columbia University
M.A. 2005 Columbia University
B.A. 2000 Swarthmore College

Areas of Research/Interest:

Anthropology of religion, magic and sorcery, hauntology, climate change in the Pacific, debates across ontology and non-Western/Indigenous frameworks, trajectories in autoethnographic and multimodal ethnography, transnational labor, media studies, visual anthropology, anthropology of sound, psychoanalysis, Central European avant-gardes; The Philippines, Southeast Asia, U.S. Empire/Imperialism

Teaching:

Anthropology of Film, Understanding Culture

Background:

Christina Verano Sornito Carter is an assistant professor and co-director of the App State Ethnography Lab in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. Christina is currently at work on a book manuscript, "In the House of Santa Regla: Specters of the Tropical Postcolony", which examines the convergence of global capitalism, colonial histories, indigenous spirit worlds, and rapid climate change in the central Philippines. In addition, Christina writes, makes films, and directs surrealist theater that touch on the themes of dreams, sorcery, the human and more-than-human experience of climate change in the tropics, intergenerational ghosts and trauma, figures of “modernity” in Southeast Asia, and decolonizing trajectories in media anthropology. For Sornito- Carter, sociocultural anthropology is an expansive zone of experimentation where cultural norms built on inequality can be transfigured into conceptual art forms that can model speculative futures based on social justice and unbounded joy. She has done long-term fieldwork in the Czech Republic and the Philippine Islands. 

Peer Review Publications
Carter, Christina Verano. (2019). “Tuyaw”, a Reminder of the Dead or Another Way to Talk about the Weather in the Age of the Super‐Typhoon. Journal of Historical Sociology 32(1): 38-38.

Carter, Jon Horne and Christina Verano Carter. (2019). Introduction to “Modern Monsters: Studies at the Perimeters of Humanity.” Journal of Historical Sociology 32(1): 3-6.

Invited Contribution
Carter, Christina Verano. (2019). Modern Flashiness A Method. The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere. Available at: https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/03/01/modern-flashiness-a-method/

Invited Book Review
Carter, Christina Verano. (2016). Review of Under Bright Lights by Bobby Benedicto. American Anthropologist 118(2): 418-419.

Photo Essay & Exhibition
Sornito, Christina Verano. (2018). Ex Situ: (Un)Making Space Out of Place. Edited by CraigCampbell and Yoke Sum Wong. Ex-Situ: (Un)Making Space out of Place.

Live Theater Productions
Director/Producer. The Ruse of Medusa. Erik Satie. April 2017. Black Mountain College Semester Series, Appalachian State University.

Director/Producer. The Ruse of Medusa. Erik Satie. March 2019. {Re}Happening: 2019. Camp Rockmount, Black Mountain College.