Dr Timothy Cooper

  • Smuts Research Fellow
  • Centre of South Asian Studies (CSAS)
Dr Timothy Cooper

Contact

About

Tim is an anthropologist of ethics, religion, and media infrastructures in Pakistan and High Asia. He builds his disciplinary expertise through ethnographic research on the social life of theology, technologies in practice, and moral dispute.

His book 'Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace' (Columbia University Press, 2024) has been described as a ground-breaking intervention in media studies of the Global South. He has disseminated his research beyond the academy, in ethnographic films screened at film festivals and exhibited in galleries around the world, and the curation of a landmark film retrospective at the British Film Institute.

Timothy’s postdoctoral research at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) is based on ethnographic research in Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, where energy shortages and internet censorship combine to create conditions of temporal intermittence. Conducted through ethnography among digital heritage and entrepreneurship initiatives, he examines the forms of enclosure and assembly that arise in the discontinuity of energy and internet provision.

Timothy is passionate about widening the frame of anthropological thought and practice to include new ways of doing critique. As Reviews Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, he introduced two new sections for the first time in the journal’s history that invite the inclusion of non-English scholarship and multimodal outputs. He has been the editor of Camthropod: The Cambridge Anthropology Podcast for several years, commissioned dozens of new episodes, and held regular workshops advocating for a sonic essay form unique to anthropological analysis.

Research

Research interests

  • Technologies in Practice
  • Film & Visual Culture
  • Sound Studies
  • Digital Rights
  • STS
  • Religion & Politics: Anthropology of Ethics
  • Islamic Theology
  • Secularity & Post-Secularity
  • Infrastructure: Environmental Media
  • Urban Anthropology
  • “Atmospheres” and Ecology
  • Engaged Anthropology: Ethnographic Filmmaking
  • Film Curation
  • Multimodal practice and analysis

Key publications: 

Books

  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2024. Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press. (Religion, Culture, and Public Life series).

Edited Collections

  • Cooper, T.P.A., Simpson, N. and Edwards, M. eds., 2024. Back to the Present. American Ethnologist Online.

Journal Articles

  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2025. Imamat in Stone: Theologies of the present in the Karakoram Mountains. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., Niyogi De, E., Degani, M., Eisenlohr, P. and Jaju, G., 2025. Moral Atmospheres: A Book Forum. History and Anthropology.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2024. The situation of the interface: Pashto master-copies and data migration in Sharjah. American Ethnologist, 51(2), pp.181–192.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2023. Recitations on the threshold: the ethics and virtue affects of Pakistani Shi’i qaṣīda. Journal of Ethnomusicology, 67(2), pp.219–242.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2022. “Live has an atmosphere of its own”: Azadari, ethical orientation, and tuned presence in Shi’i media praxis. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 28(2), pp.651–675.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2022. Mood As Medium: Reconstruction and the Material Speculations of “New Heritage”. Journal of Material Culture, 27(2), pp.124–146.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2021. Essence in Excess: Heritage and the Problem of Potentiality. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 29(4), pp.1099–1105.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2021. 3D Ziyarat: Lenticularity and technologies of the moving image in material and visual piety. Material Religion, 17(3), pp.291–316.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2020. The Kaččā and the Pakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62(2), pp.262–295.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2018. Cinema Itself: Cinephobia, Filmic Anxieties, and Ontologies of the Moving Image in Pakistan. Visual Anthropology, 31(3), pp.253–267.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2017. Raddi Infrastructure: Collecting Film Memorabilia in Pakistan: An Interview with Guddu Khan of Guddu’s Film Archive. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 7(2), pp.151–171.

Book Chapters

  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2025. Thinking with Film at Evernew Studios. In: C. Moffat, A. Maqsood and F. Sajjad, eds. Lahore Viaduct: An Alternative Guide to Lahore. London: UCL Press. Open Access.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2020. The Circulatory Dynamics of Pakistani Film. In: A.N. Ahmad and A. Khan, eds. Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death. London & Karachi: Oxford University Press, pp.211–229.
  • Cooper, T.P.A., 2015. The Black Market Archive: The Velocity, Intensity, and Spread of Pakistani Film Piracy. In: A. Downey, ed. Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Knowledge Production in the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris, pp.401–418.

Teaching and supervision

Teaching: 

Timothy is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and teaches widely at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Research supervision: 

Timothy is a dissertation supervisor for students in the MPhils in Modern South Asian Studies; Social Anthropology; and Health, Medicine, and Society.