Veronika Kusumaryati

Veronika Kusumaryati is an assistant professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her PhD in Anthropology with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University (2018). Her research has focused on indigenous politics, race and identities, and digital media in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. She has done ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Indonesia, the United States and the Netherlands since 2012. Her current book manuscript analyzes the idea of race and indigeneity in West Papua (Indonesia), and how they have shaped Euro-American and post-colonial ideologies of racial hierarchy. Her work has been published in the journal of Comparative Studies in Society and History, Critical Asian Studies, and the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Veronika Kusumaryati is also interested in multimodal ethnography, and with Ernst Karel, have composed a feature length documentary “Expedition Content”. The film is derived from the sound archives of Michael Rockefeller (the fourth generation of the Rockefeller family) that he recorded in West Papua during the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea. The film has been screened at international film festivals, such as the Berlin international festival in 2020. The film has received a special mention for Loridan-Ivens/CNAP Award at Cinéma du reel in Paris and listed as one of the New York Times’ best films of 2022.

Before joining UW, she was a college fellow at Harvard College (2018-2020) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Link to the department profile: https://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/staff/kusumaryati-veronika/

Link to the film: http://www.cinemaguild.com/theatrical/expeditioncontent.html