William Lempert

Adjunct Research Fellow

PhD Candidate

Email: william.lempert@nd.edu.au

  • Biography

    Willi Lempert is currently completing his PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Since first visiting the Kimberley in 2006, he has collaborated on dozens of film projects with PAKAM and Goolarri, two Indigenous media organizations based in Broome, including a period of nearly two years between 2014-2016. He will join the faculty at Bowdoin College in 2018 and looks forward to regularly returning to the Kimberley to collaborate on media projects in the coming years.

  • Teaching areas

    • Visual Anthropology
    • Collaborative Media Production
    • Indigenous Studies

  • Research expertise and supervision

    In my dissertation, Broadcasting Indigenous Futures: The Social Life of Kimberley Aboriginal Media, I follow the social lifecycles of dozens of film projects through daily collaboration within production teams, in order to understand the stakes of Aboriginal self-representation embedded within the process of filmmaking itself. My research analyzes the paradoxical relationship between the production of films that vividly imagine hopeful and diverse Indigenous futures, and the current widespread defunding of Aboriginal communities and organizations.

  • Journal articles and proceedings

    • 2018 “Generative Hope in the Post-Apocalyptic Present.” Cultural Anthropology. (To appear in the May Issue).
    • 2018 “Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology. (To appear in the May Issue).
    • 2014 “Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film.” Visual Anthropology Review 30(2):164-176.
    • 2013 “ ‘Last Night all the Synagogues in Germany were Burned’: Intimacy and Ethnographic Practice in a Familial Life History.” Journal of Contemporary Anthropology 5(1):68-75.
    • 2012 “Telling Their Own Stories: Indigenous Film as Critical Identity Discourse.” The Applied Anthropologist 32(1):23­-32.

  • Original creative work

    For examples of streaming film projects I have collaborated on see https://williamlempert.com/video-gallary/

  • Awards

    • 2017 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
    • 2016 University of Colorado Dissertation Completion Fellowship
    • 2016 National Indigenous Television Spirit Award (with PAKAM)
    • 2015 Lois Roth Endowment Project Support Award
    • 2014 Fulbright IIE US Scholar Program Research Grant
    • 2014 Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
    • 2013 University of Colorado Dean’s Graduate Student Dissertation Research Grant

  • Other

    Please see my website, williamlempert.com for more information about my collaborative film and podcast productions, as well as my research projects, publications, and public scholarship.