Profile:
I'm coeditor of The Future of Text and Image (2012) and Millennium Villages Project (2016), a photo book examining the UN goals to alleviate extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm also editor of Macondo, a photo book documenting the long-term conflict in Colombia. I've published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Photography and Culture, the Romanic Review, the New Republic, the Journal of American History, and Nomadikon, among others, and have pieces in numerous anthologies. I've appeared on CNN as a scholar of photography and digital culture as well as in the documentary 9/11: Ten Years Later (RAI 2011).
I have curated photography shows at The Gallatin Galleries; these exhibitions explore the dynamics between collective memory, history, and photography. And I'm Project Director for Lost Rolls America, a national archive of photography and memory. Visit the archive: www.lostrollsamerica.com
Broadly speaking, my research focuses on questions of memory and visual media, and I'm particularly interested in the politics and ethics of photography. I focus on photojournalism, with a specialty in conflict photography. My scholarship and my teaching also explore the intersections of literature and visual culture, and I concentrate on journalism, in particular for my classes, on the coverage of New York City, both present day and historic.
I am the faculty advisor to The Antithesis, The New School's social justice newspaper.
My forthcoming book with Bloomsbury Press, Conversations on Conflict Photography, focuses on coverage of war and humanitarian crises.
My other current project is Biography of a Photo, in collaboration with award-winning photographer Ron Haviv. Our work on that documentary film has taken us to Panama, where we met with President Juan Carlos Varela, among others, about our research. See the trailer here: www.biographyofaphoto.com
Recent Publications:
Books
Conversations on Conflict Photography. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming.
Macondo: Memories of the Colombian Conflict. Ed. Lauren Walsh. Madrid, 2017.
The Millennium Villages Project. Coedited with Ron Haviv and Gary Knight. NY: De.MO. 2016.
The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures. Co-edited with Ofra
Amihay. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012.
Selected articles and book chapters
· “Picturing the Past.” Macondo. Brizzolis: Madrid, 2017.
· “The Omni American Author: An Albert Murray Collection.” Hyperallergic. January 23, 2017.
· Interview with photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown on his 2011 coverage of the Libyan Revolution, Hyperallergic, September 10, 2016.
· “The Lost Rolls and the Unreliable Shadow of Memory.” In The New Republic. March 2016.
· “Text, Image, Memory: Intermediality in the Work of Péter Nádas.” Hungarian Literature and its Intercultural Contexts: Translation, Cultural Memory, Comparative Scholarship. Eds. András Kiséry, Zsolt Komaromy, and Zsuzsanna Varga. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016.
· Translation of “New Tendencies in Jazz” by Albert Murray. (Speech originally delivered in French, 1958. Never before published.) Murray Talks Music. Ed. Paul Devlin. Minneapolis:Minnesota University Press, 2016.
· "Swimming in the Unreliable Shadow of Memory," introduction to The Lost Rolls by Ron Haviv. Blurb, 2015.
· “Gender, Art, Perception: Lauren Walsh interviews Siri Hustvedt.” Los Angeles Review of Books. March 24, 2014.
· “In Memory of Albert Murray.” Los Angeles Review of Books. September 16, 2013.
· “Inside FSG: An Interview with Boris Kachka.” Los Angeles Review of Books. August 4, 2013.
· “The Madeleine Revisualized: Proustian Memory and Sebaldian Visuality.” The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures. Eds. Amihay, Ofra and Lauren Walsh. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012.
· “Ten Years Later: Re-viewing 9/11’s Suppressed Images.” Nomadikon, “About Images” series. Ed. Øyvind Vågnes. (August 2011).
· “Murray Riffing on Mann: Variations on a Theme.” Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation. Ed. Barbara Baker. Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2010.
· “Candide, or Optimism, Dude. The Challenges of Translating Voltaire’s Candide.” Candide at 250: Scandal and Success. Exhibition at The New York Public Library, February-April, 2010.