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Lauren Walsh

Visiting Assistant Professor
lmw242@nyu.edu
(212) 992-6303
615 - 1 Wash Pl

Office Hours
Monday 2:00 TO 5:00 (BY APPT)
Wednesday 2:00 TO 5:00 (BY APPT)

Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
B.A., Comparative Literature, Columbia University
M.A., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
M.Phil., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Lauren Walsh’s books include Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter (2022), Shadow of Memory (co-author, 2021), and Conversations on Conflict Photography (2019). She is co-editor of The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures (2012) and The Millennium Villages Project (2016), and photo editor of Macondo: Memories of the Colombian Conflict (2017). Walsh has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Photography and Culture, The Romanic Review, The Journal of American History, The New Republic, and Nomadikon, among others, and has articles in numerous anthologies. In addition to her appearances on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, she has appeared on radio programs and in documentary films as an expert on photography. Walsh leads media literacy educational initiatives both in the US and abroad, and has led workshops and lectured globally, with an emphasis on ethics and photography. She is heading the media literacy education connected to a new global standard in digital image authenticity and verification (the Content Authenticity Initiative). Walsh is interested in contemporary debates in visual culture. She focuses particularly on photojournalism, with a specialty in conflict photography and peace journalism. She is Director of Lost Rolls America, a national archive of photography and memory, and runs Gallatin’s Photojournalism Lab. In 2017, she was awarded Gallatin's Excellence in Teaching Award.

Performances, Productions, Exhibitions & Releases

2023

Content Authenticity Initiative

Lauren Walsh developed curricula in media/visual literacy for US middle school, high school, and college level with the Content Authenticity Initiative. (curricula available summer 2023). She is a co-organizer, with NYU Grey Art Gallery, a series of talks on photography in the contemporary moment.

2020

Walsh Exhibition

Lauren Walsh organized the June 2020 showcase, “Quarantine Through the Lens of Gen Z,” for The Bronx Documentary Center, featuring work by the students in her “Photographing Peace” course.

Books

2023

Conversations on Conflict Photography

Lauren Walsh's Conversations on Conflict Photography was published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

2023

Shadow of Memory

 

Lauren Walsh and Ron Haviv's Shadow of Memory was published by MESS.

 

2023

Through the Lens The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter

Lauren Walsh's Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter was published by Routledge.

Teaching and Research Interests

photography (theory  culture  history of  ethics  in literature); visual culture; war reportage; journalism and social activism; memory studies; media studies and critical theory; 20th- and 21st-century literature 

Recent News

PROJECTS

Supported by PhotoWings, and working with Lost Rolls America, Professor Lauren Walsh is co-authoring a national high school curriculum on visual literacy, and the role of photography historically and today.

In October 2017, Walsh was on the faculty, conducting portfolio reviews, for the 30th Annual Eddie Adams Workshop, an intensive photography workshop held in Jeffersonville, New York.

Walsh and photographer Ron Haviv's project, the forthcoming documentary film Biography of a Photo, was featured in the fall 2016 issue of Gallatin Today. Their work on the film has taken them to Panama, where they interviewed President Juan Carlos Varela, and to Bosnia, where they spoke with Prime Minister Fadil Novalić as well as Bakir Izetbegović of the tripartite presidency of the country. See the film trailer here.

Walsh had a photo exhibition at Photoville, a photography festival that has over 100K visitors, in Brooklyn, New York, in September 2017. The exhibition featured work from the Lost Rolls America archive, for which Walsh is Project Editor. This show was featured on PIX11 and NY1, and in The New York Times, among other outlets.

Walsh curated Macondo: Memories of the Colombia Conflict, which was held in The Gallatin Galleries from December 13, 2016 to January 25, 2017. The show was featured in New York Magazine's Approval Matrix, in the highbrow/brilliant section. The exhibit in featured the photography of Álvaro Ybarra Zavala.   

Walsh was interviewed by La Estrella de Panama and La Prensa about her work with photographer Ron Haviv.

Walsh is co-editor of the Millennium Villages Project (2016), a photo book documenting efforts at poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa. This work was exhibited at Photoville 2017.  

Her book-in-progress, Conversations on Conflict Photography, focuses on photographic coverage of war and humanitarian crises and is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.  

With Keith Miller, Walsh curated the photo show Lost to History: Covering Conflict in the Age of the Eternal Present, held in The Gallatin Galleries from September 16 to October 14, 2015.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

Walsh delivered “Memory, Aesthetics, and Visual Storytelling” for The Artists Talk on Arts series at the National Arts Club, in New York, New York, on December 18, 2018.

Walsh presented “Lost Rolls America: Photography and Archives,” with PhotoWings at the Photoville Festival, Brooklyn, New York, on September 15, 2018.

Walsh spoke about the Lost Rolls America archive at The Month of Photography Los Angeles (MOPLA) festival in April 2018.Also on view at the Festival was an exhibition of the Lost Rolls America photographs.

Walsh spoke at the Memory Module festival in Sarajevo, Bosnia in April 2018 about her in-progress documentary film, Biography of a Photo.
Walsh will speak about the Lost Rolls America archive at The Month of Photography Los Angeles (MOPLA) festival in April 2018. There will also be an exhibition of the Lost Rolls America photography at the festival.

Walsh will speak at the Memory Module festival in Sarajevo, Bosnia in April 2018. She will be talking about her in-progress documentary film, Biography of a Photo.

Professor Walsh was an invited speaker for the Emerging Consequences symposium, Salem State, Massachusetts, which was held November 3-4, 2017. She delivered the talk “Iconic Images in the Aftermath of Conflict."

Professor Walsh was an invited speaker to the masterclass “From Photography to Film,” which was held at The Sarajevo Film Festival, in August 2017.

Professor Walsh gave the keynote address at the conference “Why Remember? Memory and Forgetting in Times of War and Its Aftermath” in Sarajevo in June 2017.

In March 2017, Professor Walsh spoke at SXSW on “The New Archive: How Tech Democratizes Historical Narratives.”

In December 2016, Walsh gave a talk with Ron Haviv about their current research at the Casa Santa Ana cultural foundation in Panama.

She gave the keynote, “Iconic Photos and their Impact on Society—Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” at the 2016 LDV Capital Vision Summit in New York, New York, in May 2016.

In April 2016, Walsh gave a talk on archival photos as part of the Double Take reading series at Apexart in NYC.

In February 2016, Walsh gave a PechaKucha talk, “The Nature of Memory, the Design of Images” at Gallatin.

Walsh spoke at Columbia University on Albert Murray and Thomas Mann in February 2016.

In July 2015, Walsh spoke at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, giving a talk titled “Souvenir, Trophy, Crime: Photography and War in the Digital Age.”

In November 2014, Walsh gave the closing address at the symposium Albert Murray: His Life and Work, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

MEDIA AND PUBLICATIONS

Walsh’s essay “Text, Image, Memory: Intermediality in the work of Péter Nádas” appears in Hungarian Literature and Its Intercultural Contexts: Translation, Cultural Memory, Comparative Scholarship, edited by András Kiséry, Zsolt Komaromy, and Zsuzsanna Varga (2016).

Walsh wrote the introductory essay, “Swimming in the Unreliable Shadow of Memory,” for Ron Haviv’s The Lost Rolls (2015), which won an American Photography juried award (2016). Her related piece “The Lost Rolls and the Unreliable Shadow of Memory” ran in the New Republic in March 2016.

Her translation (from the French) of “New Tendencies in Jazz” by Albert Murray appears in Murray Talks Music, edited by Paul Devlin (2016).

Walsh’s interview with photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown, on his coverage of the 2011 Libyan revolution, appeared in Hyperallergic in September 2016.

Her review of Albert Murray: Collected Essays and Memoirs ran in Hyperallergic in January 2017.

Lauren Walsh