Cameron Shafii

Shafii's research sits at the intersection of modern and contemporary art and continental philosophy, with special emphasis on relationships among the visual arts and the aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories of German modernism. He has a comparative interest in representations of bodily self-injury in performance art and portrait painting, and is specifically interested in metaphors of surgical reconstruction and plasticity in Wiener Aktionismus and the early Wiener Moderne. Cameron is also interested in the materiality of sensation and its relation to thought in continental philosophy, especially French deconstruction. His research engages aesthetic philosophies of time alongside phenomenological paradigms of subjectivity, investigating corporeal and spatial registers of bodily flesh.

Shafii received his B.A. with Highest Honors in German from the University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote his thesis on the poetics and politics of object-oriented ontologies in Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology. Before coming to the University of Pennsylvania, Cameron worked in internet technology developing text classification systems for search engines. Cameron is also a practitioner of electroacoustic music and has published compositions on various music labels.

As an editor at Slought, Cameron is building partnerships with artists, production houses, and distributors to publish texts through the Slought Foundation imprint on contemporary art and continental philosophy.