Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2003
Matthew Hull’s research focuses on the nexus of representation, technology, and institutions. His ethnographic and historical work focuses on the the Indian Subcontinent, especially India and Pakistan.
He is currently working on book titled, INCORPORATIONS: Collective Life and Capitalism, that will extend the anthropological study of governance from the state to modern corporations as politico-legal institutions, emphasizing communicative practices as key to their political-economic significance
His book, GOVERNMENT OF PAPER: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (California, 2012), examines governance as a semiotic and material practice through an account of the role of writing and written artifacts in the operations of city government in Islamabad. It was awarded the 2019 J.I. Staley Prize of the School of Advanced Research.
He has also worked on lotteries and police in contemporary India, and the deployment of American technologies of democracy in urban India from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In the Department of Anthropology he is associated with both the Social-Cultural and the Linguistic Anthropology subfields. His other affiliations include the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History, the Program in Science, Technology and Society, and the Center for South Asian Studies.
He was a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows from 2003-05 and taught for several years at the University of North Carolina before returning to the University of Michigan. He teaches courses on corporations, technology and materiality, language, South Asia, and social theory.
