Ian Morrison

Ian Anthony Morrison is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology Department at the American University in Cairo. His research engages with questions of the nation, identity, religion, memory and political subjectivity through the use of continental social thought and psychoanalytic theory. He is currently working on three main projects: 1) an examination of the manner in which events which are deemed collective traumas are conceptualized and incorporated into conceptions of history and identity in a series of Western and non-Western contexts; 2) re-assessing Benedict Anderson’s canonical conceptualization of the nation as an imagined community with the aid of Marxist interpretations of history, desire and abstraction; and 3) exploring the relationship between fantasy, desire and secularization.

Teaching:

SOC/ANTH 5201: Classical Social Thought - SOC/ANTH 5202: Contemporary Social Thought - SOC/ANTH 5210: Extimacies: Decolonizing Critical Theory - SOC 4099: The National Image - SOC 3102: Contemporary Social Theory - SOC 3104: The History of Social Thought