Regular member of ESEI
Jessica Auchter has been a Full Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies since 2022. Previously, she worked at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, USA (2012-2022).
Her research is on visual culture and politics. Her current research program is on the visual representation of atrocity and corpses and human rights in international studies.
She is the author of Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo (Cambridge, 2021) and The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (Routledge, 2014) and dozens of articles and book chapters in journals like Critical Studies on Security, Journal of Global Security Studies, International Affairs, Millennium, Journal for Cultural Research, Global Discourse, Human Remains and Violence, Review of International Studies, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the recipient of the International Studies Association's Fred Hartmann Prize for her research on undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border.
She is also an associate editor of the journal International Political Sociology and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Narrative Politics. She sits on the Governing Council of the International Studies Association Northeast, where she was program chair for their conference in 2016, and region chair in 2018.
Recent publications:
Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 2021.
Voices and Storytelling: Who Speaks As Historical IR? Contribution to Forum on Historical IR, with Andrew Szarejko, Tobias Lemke, Alexander Barder, Daniel Green, Stephen Pampinella, and Swati Srivastava, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, forthcoming 2022.
Ghosts, in Yifat Gutman and Jenny Würstenburg, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism. Routledge, forthcoming.
The Personal is Political: Feminist Critiques of Countering Violent Extremism, in Alice Martini, Kieran Ford, and Richard Jackson, eds, Encountering Extremism: A Critical Examination of Theoretical Issues and Local Challenges, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
Burial, Reburial, and the Securing of Memory, Interdisciplinary Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2020, 113-137.
Virtual and Augmented Reality: Memorializing Deaths of Migrants Along the US-Mexico Border, in Sabine Marschall, ed, Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement, London: Palgrave, July 2020.
The Global Dead and the Ethics of Mourning and Remembrance, in Birgit Schippers, Routledge Handbook to Rethinking Ethics in International Relations, London: Routledge, July 2020.
Narrating Trauma: Individuals, Communities, Storytelling, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2, 2019, 273-283.
“Death in This Country is Normal”: Quiet Deaths in the Global South, in Francois Debrix and Caroline Alphin, eds, Necrogeopolitics, London: Routledge, 2019.
Welcoming the Ghost, contribution to forum ‘On the Spectrality of the Inter-state-eal/International, Contexto Internacional, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2019, 663-687.
Orienting the Body: Affective Methodology and Embodiment, in Eric Van Rythoven and Mira Sucharov, eds, Methodology and Emotion in International Relations: Parsing the Passions, London: Routledge, 2019.
Imag(in)ing The Severed Head: ISIS Beheadings and the Absent Spectacle, Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2018, 66-84.
Stories of a Death Tourist, Journal of Narrative Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2018, 145-147.
Displaying Dead Bodies: Bones and Human Biomatter Post-Genocide, Human Remains and Violence, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2018, 41-55.
Research interests
- Visual politics and culture
- Human rights violations
- Memory and memorialization
- Interpretive Research Methods