As Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology, Mark is primarily responsible for shaping the educational and research agendas within the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.

More information about Mark Westmoreland

After coordinating the master’s specialization in Visual Ethnography since 2015 and developing several virtual learning platforms, Mark’s attention is now focused on developing a multimodal trajectory through the bachelor’s curriculum. Mark has also launched ReCNTR as a collaborative and interdisciplinary center to develop a rigorous space for sharing and producing practice-based and multimodal research. More broadly, Mark served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review before co-founding the Writing with Light magazine for anthropological photoessays. 

Mark’s research engages both scholarly and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and political agency. In Lebanon, he addresses the crucial role experimental documentary practices play in addressing recurrent political violence, while in Egypt he focused on the activist mode of resistance-by-recording in mass street protests. Further informed as a lead researcher for the Middle East Photographic Preservation Initiative, Mark has written extensively on the interface between sensory embodiment and media aesthetics in ongoing legacies of contentious politics. He is currently developing a new multimodal and collaborative research agenda about attending to broken landscapes.