I am a Latin Americanist anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) scholar currently employed as a postdoctoral teaching scholar in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University.  I hold a B.A. in anthropology and Spanish from Grinnell College (2003) and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida (2010).

My ethnographic and archival research presents the first intensive analysis of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment as a public and postcolonial science. More broadly, my work draws on STS methods and theories to rethink how historical beings manifest in the present through the mediation of texts, artifacts, memories, bodies, and spirits. I am currently writing a manuscript titled The Late Linda Schele: A Book.

Publications

Watson, Matthew C. In press. "The Animal Anthropology of Linda Schele's Spirits." Forthcoming in Cultural Critique.

Watson, Matthew C. In press. "Derrida, Stengers, Latour, and Subalternist Cosmopolitics." Forthcoming in Theory, Culture & Society.

Watson, Matthew C. In press. "Mediating the Maya: Hieroglyphic Imaging and Objectivity." The Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2): 177-196.

Watson, Matthew C. 2012. "Staged Discovery and the Politics of Maya Hieroglyphic Things." American Anthropologist 114(2):282-296.

Watson, Matthew C. 2011. "Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern: Problematizing Latour's Idea of the Commons." Theory, Culture & Society 28(3):55-79.

Reviews

Watson, Matthew C. In press. "The Poverty of Postcolonial Theory?" Review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Vivek Chibber). Forthcoming in Postcolonial Studies.

Watson, Matthew C. 2013. Review of The Ecological Thought (Timothy Morton). Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events.

Watson, Matthew C. 2012. "Dissecting Postcolonial Biomedicine." Review of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Warwick Anderson). Science as Culture 21(2):277-281.