Associate Professor Tamara T. Kohn is a socio-cultural anthropologist with extensive fieldwork experience in the Scottish Hebrides, the eastern hills of Nepal, Japan and the US. She has held research and teaching positions in England (Oxford & Durham) and currently teaches at the University of Melbourne. She is interested in identity, the study of trans-cultural communities of practice (from caring practices to sports and other embodied arts), death studies and the anthropology of the body and senses.
She is currently chief investigator on two ARC Discovery Grants. The first is on Sonic Practice in Japan (with C. Stevens and R. Chenhall). This focuses on ‘sonic practice’ and social relations in Japan – it explores how sound is significant to people in their everyday lives. One ongoing project outcome is a digital sound repository called Sonic Japan. The second is on Digital Commemoration (with M. Arnold, M. Gibbs, B. Nansen). This team looks at how the internet and new technologies are changing our ideas and practices around death and commemoration.
In addition to these projects, she is also conducting her own research within the US penal system on creativity, art, body practices and personal transformation, based on visits and correspondences with long-term convicts in the US (on Death Row or LWOP).
related publications
‘Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media’ Mortality 20:4 (with M. Gibbs, J. Meese, B. Nansen and M. Arnold, 2015).
‘Crafting Selves on Death Row’ in Emotion, Identity and Death, Mortality Across Disciplines (2012).
‘The Restless Dead in the Digital Cemetery’ in Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age (2014).