Eszter Polonyi
Eszter Polonyi is an Assistant Professor in Cultural History at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia and an ACROSS Visiting Lecturer at the University of Udine. Eszter’s research focuses on extractivist paradigms of sensory perception emerging at the intersection of early and mid-twentieth-century film, photography and science and in regions that are geopolitically peripheral to Europe and North America.
She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled An Archaeology of Recognition Media and is PI of a two-year research project on Identity Photography that is funded by the Slovenian National Research Agency (ARRS). Before moving to Europe, she taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate in 2017 at the Art History&Archaeology Department. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the SSRC, DAAD, the British AHRC, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and the Polish Institute of Advanced Study.
Martina Caruso
Martina Caruso is an art historian who completed her BA at the University of Oxford (2002) and her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2013). Her book Italian Humanist Photography from Fascism to the Cold War was published in 2016. Since joining the Archaeology of Identity Photography project, Martina has been spending time in archives in Slovenia, Croatia and Italy researching the ways in which the fascist police developed and used identity photography as a means of tracking partisans in the Adriatic borderlands.
Institutional Affiliations
University of Nova Gorica (UNG), Nova Gorica, 5000 Slovenia
COST Action “History of Identity Documentation in European Nations: Citizenship, Nationality and Migration” (HIDDEN) CA21120
Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova