Abram Coetsee

Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English

Abram Coetsee is a South-African born and U.S. raised student in the English Ph.D. program at Cornell University. His research and teaching focus on aesthetics, political confrontation, and public space in early 20th century art. He uses questions of cultural legibility, assimilation and its resistances, and the materialist force of aesthetics to analyze artistic and revolutionary acts under a broader horizon of expressive events. Coetsee holds bachelors' degrees in English and religious studies from University of California–Berkeley, and is a junior fellow at the Berkeley Institute. As a 2015–16 fellow at the New York Council for the Humanities, he looks at methods of archivization and political community in a project on contemporary graffiti in New York City.