Matthew Hull

Matthew Hull will spend his fellowship year working on a book titled, Incorporations: Capitalism, Communication, and Collective Life, that will extend the anthropological study of governance from the state to modern corporations as politico-legal institutions, emphasizing communicative practices as key to their political-economic significance. The book will place corporations at the center of early American democracy and examine a diversity of corporations, from the English East India Company to contemporary New Guinea land corporations.

Hull is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the nexus of representation, technology, and institutions, especially in the Indian Subcontinent. His book, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (University of California Press, 2012), examines governance as a semiotic and material practice through an account of the role of writing and written artifacts in the operations of city government in Islamabad. It was awarded the 2019 J.I Staley Prize of the School of Advanced Research. He has also worked on lotteries and police in contemporary India, and the deployment of American technologies of democracy in urban India from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

For more information, please visit: sites.lsa.umich.edu/matthewhull/