Kaja Silverman

Who is Kaja Silverman?

Kaja Silverman is an American film theorist and art historian. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the University of Pennsylvania History of Art Department in 2010. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

Her writing and teaching are focused at the moment primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, and time-based visual art, but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and she has a developing interest in painting. She is currently writing a book about photography, called The Miracle of Analogy, and her long-in-the-making book, Flesh of My Flesh, was published by Stanford University Press in fall 2009.

Stanford's advertisement for the long-awaited Flesh of My Flesh in PMLA 125.1 quotes a review by George Baker of UCLA stating that it "is an extraordinary book: Silverman's magnum opus [...] the kind of book that one comes across only a few times on one's life." Stanford does not give any clue as to what the book's subject matter is, however, though blurbs used for other books in the same advertisement do. The Stanford University Press website gives a much more thorough description, including the following more informative blurb by Adrienne Harris of NYU: "Kaja Silverman's thesis, pursued over centuries of artistic work and thought, is that it is in the experience of analogy that an authentic approach to mortality is possible. Above all, her project is to illuminate the ways that the individual—artist, soldier, or citizen—is haunted by war and violence and that the metabolizing of such violence and horror requires relationality. From a psychoanalytic perspective in which intersubjectivity and relatedness are central, this is fascinating and welcome news."